School Specialty, Inc.

Do you know this $1B education materials company based in Greenville, WI. Their science division is based in Nashua, NH. At first blush, looks like they own the market for scientific kits/materials, phys ed, school furniture, etc.

The School Specialty Science division in New Hampshire owns the FOSS, DSM, SCI3+ and other brands of lab-in-a-box kits. FOSS is Full Option Science System developed over 30 years by the Lawrence Hall of Science at UC Berkeley. Maybe the leading set of kits. Impressive at a glance.

10K looks worth reading. Except below. URL http://library.corporate-ir.net/library/72/721/72100/items/299473/SCHS0810K.pdf

We are the largest provider of supplemental educational products and equipment to
the pre-kindergarten through twelfth grade (“preK-12”) education market in the United States and Canada. We
believe we are more than seven times larger than our nearest competitor in the supplemental educational products
and equipment market. With the industry’s broadest offering of more than 75,000 products, we are able to be the
single source supplier for substantially all of our customers’ supplemental educational product needs. Nearly 50% of
our revenues are derived from our proprietary products. We reach our customers through the industry’s largest sales
force of approximately 600 professionals, catalog mailings and our proprietary e-commerce websites. In fiscal 2008,
we believe we sold products to approximately 80% of the estimated 120,000 schools in the United States and we
believe we reached substantially all of the 3.7 million teachers in those schools.