NEW YORK, August 25, 2005 — Berkery, Noyes & Co., LLC today announced Wicks Learning Group, LLC, an affiliate of The Wicks Group of Companies, L.L.C. (the “Wicks Group”), a New York-based private equity firm, has entered into a definitive agreement to sell Delta Education, LLC, an independent publisher of curriculum and supplemental educational materials for Pre-K to 9th grade, to School Specialty, Inc. (Nasdaq: SCHS – News), for $272 million. Berkery, Noyes & Co., LLC and Credit Suisse First Boston advised the Wicks Learning Group on the transaction.

Founded in 1974, New Hampshire-based Delta Education, LLC (https://www.delta-education.com), has been serving educators for more than 30 years. Its flagship product, the Full Option Science System (FOSS®), is the leading K-8 inquiry-based elementary science program in the U.S. FOSS® has been developed under a National Science Foundation grant at the Lawrence Hall of Science at the University of California at Berkeley, which has been guiding the development process for over 25 years.  As part of the Delta transaction, School Specialty has also acquired its Educators Publishing Service (“EPS”) division, a supplemental publisher of reading titles for grades K-8.

Berkery, Noyes, founded in 1982, is one of the pre-eminent merger and acquisition firms serving the information industry, having completed more than 400 merger and acquisition transactions since inception.  The company is currently on pace for a record year, having closed twelve transactions in the first half of 2005.  Among the most recent transactions completed by Berkery, Noyes are ProQuest Company’s acquisition of Voyager Expanded Learning, the sale of Facts on File to Veronis Suhler Stevenson, Wicks Medical Information’s acquisition of DesignWrite, the sale of Medquest Communications to Vendome Associates, the sale of Kurzweil Educational Systems to Cambium Learning, Thomson Corporation’s divestiture of the print-assets of Sheshunoff Information Services to AlexInformation and Sheshunoff Insurance Solutions to Highline Data, and the acquisition by Discovery Communications of AIMS Multimedia.