Our group learned that our teachers love to eat and already have enough knick-knacky type things. Our principal helped educate us. We suggested making cookies for the teachers for their staff meeting and the principal let us know we were on to something.
Additionally, we have a wonderful community volunteer that does a lot for the kids in our district and a lot for veterans. So we asked families to donate cookies and we had volunteers come and assemble cookie treat bags for all of the staff in time for their next staff meeting. We asked for extra cookies from our families which we were able to donate via our community volunteer for homeless veterans and the Veterans Hospital. The response was tremendous.

Along the individual snack lines:

Create your own candy wrapper for a mini snack (like mini Hershey bars) that say, "Teachers make learning sweet!"

Distribute animal crackers and include a note that says, "This place would be a zoo without you!"

All of these ideas that you're sharing also work well for the often-overlooked custodians, cafeteria staff, office members, etc.

I like the thought of giving small items that could be used in the classroom(like the kleenex and glue sticks). I know many teachers who spend a lot of their own money on supplies. Here are some others I thought of:

dry erase markers= You're leaving your mark in our children's hearts
construction paper, paints, brushes, scissors=You're creating masterpieces of education everyday.

I do little candy bars each month. I get whatever is on sale and put a sticker with a little saying. The staff loves it and it costs about $25-40 to do it for everyone!

Snickers-we are nuts about our teachers and staff
Milky Way-Our teachers and staff are out of this world

Things like that. It is pretty easy!

Mini Kleenex packs are great if you get them at the dollar store and say "your hard work is nothing to sneeze at".
I stocked up on glue sticks and put "We can be the best school if we stick together"

Good luck!

I am both a teacher and parent. Time is a gift. Give a homemade gift certificate for class coverage, copies to be made, hall duty coverage, lunch duty coverage whatever side duties the teacher may have. It will depend on the amount of volunteers you have. I have found many love the certificate but maybe 20% actually cash them in.

Also on Jim's poem idea. I took a big jar and placed candy like smarties and wrote a quote onthe bottle. " Thanks for helping to make our kids smart." It was cheap and everyone goes to the faculty room.

Words are nice too. Have the students or parents create a "tree of thanks" you place a trunk made of paper on the wall, the kids fill out a leaf with a thank you on it and you fill in the tree. The hard part about this is making sure everyone gets a leaf. Then you place the leaves in their mailboxes at the end.

Food always works, but some teachers are weary. So you may want to think of prepackaged or store made.

Hope this helps's, remember that the little things go just as far. Good luck!!

One year during teacher appreciation week at our elementary, we bought apples for all of the teachers, I wrote a little thank you poem to go with them and put one on each staff member's desk. This time of year apples are relatively inexpensive.

You can also coordinate parents to do a monthly snack- send in muffins, fruit, cheese and crackers. Our parents always respond very well to bringing goodies for the teachers and this is a no cost for the parent group(except maybe for napkins, paper plates).

You know though, every time we did something that included a little note or poem we got more comments from the staff on the written words then the food/gift.