I am the Treasurer for our school's PTO. Each year, our books are audited by an audit professor at a local university. The legal advice that we have been given is you cannot purchase lunches or gifts for the teachers. According to him, "If you are raising money to benefit the students and the school, the IRS could ask how giving lunch to the teachers or providing them awards is benefitting the school and that is a hard case to make. Teachers usually provide their own lunch, so providing teachers lunch is a benefit to the teacher, not to the school or the students. The main point, can you answer the question for any PTO program "how is this going to benefit the students or the school?" If you have a good answer (not something tangential like "buying teachers lunch makes the teachers know we appreciate them and therefore they do a better job of teaching") then you're on fairly safe ground.

We don't do personal gifts per say, but we do budget $1200 a year for appreciation. We generally have a back to school breakfast, mid-year luncheon, and end of year appreciation week. Many things are donated, but not all.

We had budget left over last year in the appreciation fund and we did purchase a tv for the staff lounge, but it was for everyone, not really a personal gift.

Wow, I thought PTOs could not purchase gifts for teachers. In the August 2004 edition of PTO Today magazine, there's an article entitled "Giving Thanks Has Its Limits" and it clearly says personal gifts to teachers are a no no.

I forgot about staff appreciation week. We have the owner of a local coffee shop come in and set up a coffee and tea bar one day during the week.

We found that we were spending more on those individual days than when we bought for a group as well as some positions didn't have special days, so we now just celebrate Staff Appreciation Week. It includes everyone and is fair. We had a budget of $1000 last year for 75 staff.

We send our secretaries flowers for Secretary's Day. We will also send flowers if one of our staff is in the hospital. Other than that, we don't do anything.