Last year our PTO spent the majority of our funds on enhancements to the school. This was great but left us with little to spend this year as well.
We do a back to school luncheon for all of the staff in our K-5 school and ask parents to donate a dish, costing the PTO nothing. In addition, we will give each staff member a $5 gift card to Subway (we have an ocean theme this year). It's just a small token to say welcome back.
Our PTO does more throughout the year, but to welcome them back, they appreciate anything we do, even if it's just lunch.
Our PTO does a back-to-school breakfast or lunch (whichever we can get donated by local restaurants) and provide $50 gift cards for all new teachers/staff and $25 gift cards to part-time teachers/staff. The money for the gift cards comes out of our PTO budget.
For Christmas last year, our PTO talked to each teacher and created a wish tree, posting all the items that teachers hoped to have for their classrooms or items that the school in general needed. We allowed parents to pick from the tree first, then reviewed the items not selected with the principal to make sure they were desirable from a school perspective and then the PTO took care of those.
No reason that you couldn't do the same type of thing for the beginning of school - it allows parents to donate and feel involved and, with the PTO picking up the remainder, still means that the teachers receive what they need to teach our children.
We ask local business to donate items. We get things like gift cards for a free lunch, a beauty salon donates shampoo samples and 50% of a hair cut, free nail polish from a manicure place, notebooks, baked goods delivered for first day teachers return to school etc. Most is not school related to school but it is fun. The local businesses see it as away to thank the teachers and of course market to them as well.
So maybe instead of giving gift cards -- you can give them a golden ticket and let them know you would like to make their class wishlist come true-- have them give a list of what they need this year and see if you can make them come true---
Thank you everyone for the ideas. I should have added that we have a big luncheon at Teacher Appreciation Day with donated food. We had our school budget be voted down and teachers supply budget reduced to practically nothing. We just ended a succesful year of fundraising so wanted to 1) acknowledge the lack of supply funds by helping out, 2) put the money back into school supplies for our children, 3) start the year off on a good foot, 4) have yet another story to tell about how PTO helps the school.
