2025 Invitation to Bid for Office & School Supplies and Multi-Purpose Paper

The Capitol Region Education Council (“CREC”) is a regional educational service center (RESC) that represents 35 communities in the Greater Hartford area and also reaches additional towns and school districts throughout the state through a number of services and programs. Prospective Respondents may find more information about CREC at http://www.crec.org/ and about the services provided by RESCs at http://www.rescalliance.org/ . CREC’s mission is to provide high quality, low-cost services for school districts to meet their various needs. These include services such as professional development, special education, transportation, and cooperative purchasing. CREC’s cooperative purchasing goal is to help districts reduce costs by A) offering one Invitation to Bid (ITB) to reduce the duplication of effort being done across school districts, municipalities, and other non-profit organizations and B) offer deeper discounts based on the potential aggregated use of the bid statewide. The CREC Cooperative Purchasing program has expanded to all New England states and New York. $85M was spent through the program in 2023; approximately $6M of that is spent annually via this bid. By this ITB, CREC seeks to establish a cooperative purchasing contract to meet the needs of school districts, municipalities, and other non-profit organizations for Office & School Supplies and Multi-Purpose Paper. Vendors must be able to service all CT towns and agencies and offer the same pricing and discounts to participating entities in other surrounding states. We do not require a “membership” from our users, rather, we make the awarded vendor contracts available to all schools, towns and non-profits.