MOULTRIE, Ga. — The former president of The McGraw-Hill Learning Group, the largest publisher of textbooks in the United States, grew up Moultrie, and he’ll be honored with this year’s Colquitt County Career Achievement Award.

The award will be presented to Pete Sayeski during the annual award banquet at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, March 7, at the Colquitt County Arts Center. He will be its eighth recipient since it was begun in 2012.

Sayeski was born Aug. 2, 1942, in Salamanca, N.Y., to Frank and Theresa Paoletto Sayeski. He moved to Moultrie in 1950 and rose from his Seventh Avenue homeplace to the highest levels of international publishing.

He graduated in the Class of 1961 from Moultrie High School, then from the University of Georgia in 1965 with a BA in Economics. While at the university, he was an active member of Sigma Chi Fraternity and the Newman Center, where he was involved in community outreach to those most in need in the Athens/Clark County area.

In July of 1965 he returned to Moultrie as the South Georgia sales representative for Houghton Mifflin Company, a Boston-based publisher of standardized tests and elementary, high school and college textbooks. In 1968, his responsibilities increased when the company assigned him the Florida State Department of Education and the northern half of Florida. This experience offered him the opportunity to learn the legislative process as well as all things pertaining to providing instructional materials to one of the fastest growing states in the country.

Sayeski was promoted by Houghton Mifflin to director of elementary and high school sales in 1972, and in 1974 he became the youngest regional vice president of any major publisher in the Southeast. Over the next 10 years the Southern Regional office of Houghton Mifflin tripled in every measurable category. During this period Sayeski joined the Education Committee of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce and worked with community leaders who were implementing new, highly sensitive, policies in the Atlanta Public Schools.

In 1983, he was appointed vice president of marketing and sales for Houghton Mifflin Company and relocated to Boston. He was responsible for marketing, sales, and distribution of all products for the elementary and high school markets in the United States. At this time he became a senior member of the division management committee that approved all publishing proposals and funding authorizations. In addition, beginning in 1983 and until retirement in 2007, Sayeski served as a member of the Association of American Publishers in Washington, D. C., where he served as a member of the Executive Committee.

In 1987, Sayeski joined The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc, a global company headquartered in New York City. McGraw-Hill was a conglomerate with significant businesses in finance (Standard & Poors), journals (BusinessWeek) and educational publishing. In his new role he became general manager of the Gregg Division, a publisher of trade and technical books for national and international markets. As general manager of the Gregg Division, he had his first total responsibility for an operating unit of a Fortune 500 Company.

In 1989, The McGraw-Hill Companies and Maxwell Communications Inc., UK, formed a joint-venture comprised of all educational assets of both companies making the new company Macmillan/McGraw-Hill School Publishing Company the largest educational publisher in the United States. Sayeski became the senior vice president and publisher for postsecondary education, one of the five new divisions of the newly formed company now located in Columbus, Ohio.

In 1991 Robert Maxwell, the former owner of Maxwell Communications and 50 percent owner of Macmillan/McGraw-Hill Schools Publishing Company, died unexpectedly in the Canary Islands. A single clause in the joint-venture contract between The McGraw-Hill Companies and Maxwell Communications allowed McGraw-Hill to purchase the Maxwell Communications equity position for $1 more than the highest bidder thus allowing The McGraw-Hill Companies to become the sole owner of the largest school publishing company in the United States.

In 1992, Sayeski was appointed president of SRA/McGraw-Hill with the charge to consolidate certain educational assets of the corporation and start a new company that aligned its products with changing educational philosophies. A state-of-the-art, high-tech production facility was built and staffed in Columbus, Ohio. In 1994 an aggressive development and acquisition plan was implemented following the principles espoused by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras in “Built to Last.” Growth targets were established that would double the size of the company in five years.

In 1996 Sayeski acquired and revised Open Court Reading, a move that contributed to quadrupling the company’s revenue over the next five years. In 2003, as part of a larger acquisition he acquired Everyday Math from Chicago Tribune Education. At this point SRA/McGraw-Hill was renamed and became The McGraw-Hill Learning Group with offices in Columbus, Ohio, and Chicago. By 2007 the McGraw-Hill Learning Group had become a sole provider for elementary reading in the Los Angeles Unified School District and elementary math in the New York City Schools, two of the top 10 schools districts in the world.

By 2003, the company, under Sayeski’s management, had begun doing significant product development work in India and printing hundreds of thousands of its textbooks in China. This initiative was a harbinger of what was to come in the global marketplace for educational publishers.

From 1997 until retirement in 2007, Sayeski was closely aligned with legislative activity in California, Texas and Florida and at the national level with the passage of No Child Left Behind. It was during this period that he served on the National School Board Foundation in Arlington, Va.

Sayeski was recognized by The McGraw-Hill Companies when presented with McGraw’s most prestigious awards the Excellence in Leadership Award in 1996 during a ceremony in New York City and A Career Achievement Award in 2007 at a leadership conference in London.

He is married to Angie Thompson Sayeski and the couple have four children and six grandchildren. The Sayeskis have chosen to spend their retirement years in Atlanta. Pete Sayeski spends some of his free time on a family farm in Wilkes County and hunting with family and life-long friends from Moultrie. Since retiring, he became a member of the Kiwanis Club of Atlanta, where he is actively involved as a classroom reader and fundraiser in the public schools. Since returning to Atlanta in 2010, Sayeski has been a parishioner at the Cathedral of Christ the King.