You complain about the cost of having the event catered, then say you spent all day shopping and preparing the food!... Because cateres don't have to do any of that!
Pay the caterer-and have SAFE wholesome food that your teachers will appreciate!

I had a idea for a teacher appreciation week at our school and I am hoping to get the OK to go with it. We have a catering company Nelsons Catering that will do a special tasting for a group size of your choice just for them to come and show case their product and advertise their catering services and fundraising program. They did this at my place of employment and they catered for free a meal for 45 people including tea & coffee, smoked pulled pork, 1/4 grilled chicken, smoked boneless pork chop, green beans, smoked garlic red potatoes,cheesey potatoes, ceasars salad, lasagna, ggeezz i dont remember what else they brought. My work now uses them on several occassions for catering our safety meals. Their food is fabulous and prices are good too. I am hoping they will allow us to do this tasting as an apppreciation dinner for the teachers and will give them a chance to sample the product I want to pitch to them about holding one of their meal fundraisers. You may want to check them out they have several different locations across the Illinois. they are not limited to the menu on their website either. My work just had smoked hotdogs, brats, hamburgers just recently with pit potatoes (the most to die for smoked tiny russet potatoes you have ever had). Their food has unbelievable flavor!!
nelsonscatering.com/

Also - I think the idea on here to honor the bus drivers with a little something is a very good idea because that is a very thankless job!!

I know from my previous job you can order build-your-own sandwich trays for less than $30 and feed anywhere between 1-15 people with a small tray.

Our PTO does a fall and spring teacher dinner on the night of conferences, which are held for two nights both in the fall and spring. We've never had a catered meal since it's a huge expense, but instead we've had a few PTO members put together a meal and use our cafeteria. Sometimes it's a soup/sandwich night, sometimes we do pasta with breadsticks and salad, etc. We've had families donate ingredients and sometimes our local grocery store is able to donate some or give us a discount.

I was in charge of hospitality 2 yrs ago and I always had parents and PTCO members donate food. Our local Starbucks donates a carafe of coffee with cups, sugar and creamer. The only money we spend is a few dollars for door prizes. We due a teacher breakfast every month and always have parents willing to donate and the teachers love it. We spend most of our budge on Teacher Appreciation week.

HTH

Karmon

Ask Starbucks to donate coffee, Dukin Doughnuts will too if you ask! They sent cups, napkins, creamer, packets of sweet N low and the cups even had lids!! We still had to get more coffee, but only had to pay for 1/2 of it!

Look on Cracker Barrell's website, I think they list their egg casserole on there. Our teachers absolutely loved it! Something new. I have one of those buffet serveres, so we put the meat in that w/ the hot water on to keep it warm through-out the breakfast.

We also had a appreciation breakfast for our bus drivers, who up until this breakfast, had never received anything for appreciation! They were speechless, to say the least! We got a really nice card of thanks from every single one of them!

Going homemade is great, they know you work hard for it, and saving money for it just makes a great thing even better!

I agree with everyone else that "homemade" is the way to go. This past year we had several events for teachers to show our appreciation and I wanted to make them special even though we couldn't go crazy with spending. I brought in all of my nice serving dishes and cloth napkins, etc. and treated it like I would if it were at my home. They were so appreciative of the extra effort we put into the event that I don't think it would have mattered what we served. I think that if you show them it's more about wanting to create something special for them they are unlikley to complain. It actually takes a lot more work to save money by doing the event yourself and I think most people realize that.

Also, we had a very large group of staff that were on diets the second half of the year. I tried to conscious of this when deciding to what to have. I know they appreciated this. We are trying to keep this going for the back to school breakfast next week. Does anyone have any recipes for breakfast dishes that would at least be better than donuts or pastries? We plan on having fruit, low fat yogurts, bagels, etc. but I would love to offer something a little more unique.

Oh, we are going to splurge on Starbucks coffee for the back to school breakfast. You can get their coffee in to go boxes that aren't outrageously expensive.