Every year the Eastern School District has a bulk-ordering program that it offers to schools in the district that want to participate.
I’ve a particular interest in this program because one of my pet issues at the PEI Home and School Federation is looking into whether it’s possible for the Federation to assist with lowering the cost of school supplies to Island families through this same sort of bulk-purchasing.
The District’s program works like this: it sends out a list of possible supplies to schools, receives back requests, compiles the totals, and then puts out the supply purchase to tender. The tender isn’t awarded as a whole: for each supply, the lowest priced tenderer winds the bid, so any given supplier might, say, win the tender for glue sticks, but not for printer ink.
This year, for example, the district needed to buy 265 dozen 9g glue sticks (that’s 3,180 glue sticks!).
The successful bidder was Grand & Toy which came it at a price of $5.04/dozen, or 42 cents each, for this product, which they sell online for 75 cents each or, if you buy more than 12, at 68 cents each.
So the District’s price represents a 44% savings over what we parents would pay retail from the same source.
In our family’s case, the Grade 4 Supply List at Prince Street School called for 4 gluesticks: we bought a 4-pack of 8g gluesticks at Staples for $3.50, or 88 cents each; if we’d purchased these at the District price we would have paid $1.68.
So we would have saved $1.82, or more than 50%.
We paid a total of $23.33 for Oliver’s school supplies this year, and we were able to save a little because he had things left over from Grade 3.
But let’s assume that’s the figure every family pays. And let’s assume that every family could save 50% on supplies through bulk-buying.
There are about 20,000 students in schools across the province, so if they each paid $11.66/year instead of $23.33/year, the total savings to Island parents would be $233,200.
That’s only a rough number, of course; but I think it’s a rough number worth following up on. Which is what I’ll do tomorrow night at the first meeting of the school season of the Home and School Federation.