Teacher Appreciation Week Dos and Don'ts:Tips for School Principals on a Budget

Have you ever had a Teacher Appreciation Week experience that, instead of leaving you feeling treasured and valued, added stress to your week and left you feeling deflated? Me too! Even with good intentions, overwhelmed administrators often miss the mark.

In this episode, I give some great tips for a budget-friendly Teacher Appreciation Week and even share a few of my favorite gestures in my two decades in the classroom. Actionable tips include:

❌  DON'T give gifts that create more work for teachers
 ❌ DON'T give insincere, last-minute gestures
 ❌ DON'T give food celebrations that barely anyone can participate in

✅  DO use the 5 suggestions in the podcast, most of which cost ZERO MONEY 💰
 that provide teachers with
✅ True support, fun, and appreciation

Share this episode with your favorite principal or that parent who is fixing to give you yet another framed photo of their child 🤣

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Transcript

Hey everybody, so this episode is going to be very actionable. It's on Teacher Appreciation Week Do's and Don'ts. So if you're an administrator, absolutely you want to listen. If you are a teacher,  you might want to share some of these ideas with your admin. Let it be out there, let it be known that there are wonderful ways to help staff feel supported and appreciated Even if, as most administrators are on this ridiculously minuscule budget, so we will get right into it.

And if you are a teacher, you know, I'm going to be sharing just a few stories that will probably make you laugh, roll your eyes and sound real familiar. So I will see you on the internet. Inside, let's do it!  Welcome to the Balance Your Teacher Life podcast, where we talk all things avoiding educator burnout, setting healthy boundaries, and achieving better work life balance. 

If you're passionate about education but tired of it consuming your whole life, you have found your home in the podcast universe. I'm your host, Grace Stevens, and let's get going with today's show. 

Teachers.  Actually, anyone in education who might be listening, you are appreciated every day. I just want to remind you that, you know, every day even though it doesn't feel like it,  I appreciate you every day. And you know what? Your students, even though they show it in such unloving ways, sometimes really appreciate it every single day.

You should be celebrated. You should be, you know, made to feel special. And I love you. Even though it's kind of like Earth Day for me. It's like, shouldn't we celebrate Earth Day every day? Shouldn't we celebrate teachers every day? Yes, we should. The same like we should celebrate moms and dads every day, right? 

This is your week coming up and I hope you get to feel treasured and appreciated and seen.  Really, that's sometimes the most  impactful thing that somebody can do for us is let us feel seen. So, if you're an administrator, maybe you're a parent listening to this. Lots of teachers are parents, right? And they have other kids their kids have other teachers in their lives.

You know, reflect on it for just a minute. How do you feel that teacher, how do you let that teacher know? Feel seen  and appreciated. So anyway, here we go. All right. So we're going to start with the do's and don'ts. We're going to try and keep it short because I know it's a crazy time of year for everybody.

But first off, I want to say,  in case you're one of my students that's listening, oh my gosh, hundreds of students I've had over the years. The littles. I want to let you know I appreciated every single flower that you picked me from your yard on the way to school.  Every single picture that you drew me.

Every single little poem that you wrote me. Every little love note. Every hug you ever gave me. Okay, I really appreciated them and I want you to know that in case you think I'm going to come off as sounding ungrateful in a minute.  Everything that came from the heart, I appreciated and treasured. When I had to clear out my classroom, first of all I had to move schools and change rooms and all those things and clear out my classroom.

I still had 20 years worth of like, you know, love notes and photos. I'm going to show you how to make a folder on your on your phone in your camera phone photos app, right? Just make a folder and take photos of all those things because they aren't all things that I could keep with me. But I still, like I said, I have them in my heart and now I have them on my phone.

And when I want to have a feel, I used to have a file called the good stuff. I still have a small file called the good stuff, but I downsize significantly. So just make a folder, the good stuff. All right. And look at it when you're feeling a little underappreciated and remember all those happy memories.

Okay.  So if any students are listening, I appreciate it. All of it. Okay. So we're going to start off first off in case there are parents listening. Let me just tell you this. You know what the kid doesn't want? I know we're like, Oh, we don't want mugs. We don't want this. We don't want that. You know, it is true.

By the time we have taught for, I mean, the first few years when we're teaching, we love that we get little trinkets that say best teacher in the world, number one teacher. But after a couple of years, we just got no room for any of that stuff physically on our desk, in our classroom, in our homes. You know what really we don't have room for, you know, some people are going to come at me for this, but I'm going to tell you, unless your kid did it, unless your child came up with the idea and it was really important to them in which case I, you know, teachers appreciate it, but we really don't want framed pictures of your child. 

We really don't. I mean, we have yearbook photos. I don't know what else to say about that. Other than, you know, I have barely have room in my house for pictures of my own children. I have received year after year photos to hang on Christmas trees of other people's children. Like that's not,  like I said, if your child came up with it, like, Oh, Mrs.

S would love this.  Okay I would never be the teacher to not wear the stuff that the kids give me. Even if it is a macaroni necklace, I will wear it with pride for the rest of the day. Okay, so but really just think about that. Try and stay away from stuff. If you're a parent that is like super, just where is the teacher literally going to put that?

So anyway, not to sound like sour grapes, but here we go. All right. For administrators, for School secretaries, for anybody, Sunshine Committee, hopefully you, you teachers aren't on this, hopefully the Sunshine Committee at your school isn't responsible for their own appreciation. You know what I'm saying.

So for anybody who's involved in it, let's start off with the Oh gosh, I like to be positive, but let's just start off with the don'ts. Let's get them out the way right away. So first off, I would say the first don't is don't just go through the motions. Swear to God, don't just make it like a checkoff list.

Like this is something that's coming up and I'm busy and I don't have you know, the budget for it. So I'm going to get, you know, Three dozen donuts, leave them in the staff room and call it a day. Okay. So  that anything that doesn't feel like genuine, like you just checked it off your to do list, doesn't feel good.

Let me give you some examples of that. And these are real examples that I lived through. One was teaching in a very small school and every year we used to put up a banner outside and that said happy teacher appreciation week that teachers could see on their way in and parents could see when the cars were getting parked. 

And we literally, this, the other teachers and I were laughing one year that it didn't go up and we were like, well, we're not going to remind the office. I wonder how long it will take them. And it was on Thursday. of Teacher Appreciation Week that a parent went in and said, shouldn't you have the banner up?

So there was that. That kind of felt really like an afterthought. And then I would have to say the worst one was the last school district I worked for. And I'm not even feeling bad if somebody from that district hears this, because shame on you. The  staff, the actual school I was in, the admin, the assistant admin, gosh, they, and the office staff went to, oh, they They gave us, they made us feel so treasured.

They did some wonderful things that I'm going to talk about. And I super appreciate that. But what soured my kind of the whole thing for me and for others too, was at the end of the week, we used to have an early release on Friday and then we always had PLCs meetings, all those things. Right. But it was so school was out of one 30 and our usual release time was three 10 for upper grades.

I'm going to say it was Friday and it was maybe 3. 45 if not four o'clock. So well after the week was over that the superintendent sent a message saying how appreciated teachers were and finish the year strong.  So it,  tone deaf. Let's just say that. It did not feel like we were appreciated. It felt like it was another way to remind us that the year wasn't over and test scores were coming up and, you know, very important.

So don't do that. That should be so blatantly obvious. Like, if you're going to appreciate teachers, appreciate them. Make it heartfelt. It doesn't need to cost money. I'm going to give you  a bunch of ways that don't cost money. But here's the first don't. So  I would say, so one of the don'ts would be, you know, try and avoid food.

It's such a cliche. I know it's the easiest thing, but really, how are you ever gonna find food that everybody feels they can participate in? By the time you take out allergies, You know, who's gluten free, carb free, vegan you know, even if you went with apples, okay, that, that should be fine for everybody, you know, somebody is gonna tell you that they were fasting, right, like it just, and then there's always a thing that the, the teachers who have the first break get the good food, and, and then kind of if you have a later break because you have older kids or whatever, you get the leftovers, so it just doesn't feel very genuine, like I said.

Picking up some bagels or a couple of donuts, you know, I'm calling it a day. That isn't even cheap. Those things do cost a lot of money. There are other things that you could do that make, could make us feel better. So that's number one. Don't do the food if you can avoid it.  Number two, don't do the kitschy little Sayings with a candy bar. 

You know what I'm saying. Just don't. Just don't. The time that you all spent doing that, I feel so bad. Like, you probably had one of the admins help you with that. Like, they could have been doing something else that was more useful. Another thing. Do please, oh come on, the coupon books. Y'all giving us coupons that we could never use, right?

One year we got a coupon book, you could leave you could be excused from a staff meeting with prior notice. You could leave right at the release time with prior notice. You could have the admin or the principal come in and teach your class for a period, so you could have an extra free period, you know, with given notice.

Now, you know, admins are the busiest people out there. When are they? gonna, I don't think that we're ever gonna be able to do that for us. Right. So in effect we had this book of coupons that like we couldn't use. If we try to excuse ourselves from a meeting, it was like, Ooh, can you choose another one?

This one's really important. So that kind of was annoying. So don't give like.  This, this token gesture that you probably thought would be really fun and helpful. But also we're adults, you know, this kind of treating us like children, like a candy bar with a cute saying, or a coupon book, you know, like coupon books are for moms to have a hug.

You know what I'm saying? Anyway, so again, I know I sound like sour grapes, but this is years of education and wanting to be treated as an adult. So don't do the food. Don't do the coupon books. Don't do it at the end of the week. And then the last one I would say, don't do anything that causes more work for us. 

As well intentioned as it sounds, you know, maybe what you have in your budget is two substitute teachers for a day. So you set up this, this this system where you're like, okay, you're going to have a roving sub for half an hour and you give us our allotted time slot.  Now first off, half an hour, You know, we got a plan for that and it, we don't get a choice in the time usually because that would be a logistics nightmare and so what happens is we got to move around our whole day so that there's something kind of, you know, low management easy that a roving sub could do with your students then some of us we know our students act so poorly for a substitute teacher for many, many reasons that I won't go into here.

Not because intentionally they want to, but they have anxiety. They don't feel good when they're, when the teacher isn't in control. You know, we're going to come back after half an hour of what, which will end up being 20 minutes. We need to leave the room. We can't stay in the room. Otherwise that defeats the purpose, right?

So now we've got to pick up some stuff and take it with us. Where are we going to sit in the staff room? Like now we've got 20 minutes. And when it took us, 40 minutes to prepare for that. And when we get back, it will take us 20 minutes to unravel the drama that happened when we were gone. And we don't have the, the time at the same time as our teaching besties, where we could at least like, Hey, let's just have a cup of coffee in the start room, start a conversation, finish the conversation, you know, that seems like an amazing luxury, so don't like the roving sub, I'm going to give you a better use of, of kind of that concept.

Okay. All right. So there are the don'ts. Let's, let's move past those. Like I said, I feel like some of those should be really obvious, but because I've lived through all of those, all of those, I didn't make those up. Those aren't hypotheticals.  Those are real. Then let's not do them. Okay. So here's some good ideas.

Okay. I'm going to start with, if you have some money. Now, that might be a small minority and I want you to know, teachers, I mean, I can only speak for myself, but in the years discussing it with others, we don't expect you to use your own money.  We really don't.  I mean, I don't think administrators get paid enough.

For sure, I mean, maybe at the district office, at the Taj Mahal, as we used to call the district office. I think there are some people who possibly do quite, maybe not earn their weight. But as a general rule, I've never met a lazy administrator. They're as busy as we are. They are as strapped as we are.

We're not expecting you to use your own personal money. But if you do have some money allocated for it, even through a perm the parents club or something else. Here's a few things. That are awesome. That costs money.  So the first, which was awesome for us was to get a couple of masseuses. Now I know you're like, Oh my God, massages for the staff.

No, like 15 minute increments over lunches. If you have two masseuses in, let's say you, it's two hours a day because you have two different lunch breaks and that should be enough over the course of the week. So that's.  So let's say that's eight spots, 40 spots a week, right? Did I do the math right? Two people, 15 minutes, two hours.

Yeah. 80 spots a week. That should be enough for all your staff. Okay. And you give them a schedule. They take 15 minutes during their lunch and all it is, is like it can be a chair massage or they can, if the masseuse brings the table, they can lay down, but it's just a shoulder and neck massage. And also this is the next project that we decided upon.

We decided upon to do a neck massage because that's where we hold most of our tension. Nobody needs to get undressed or change their clothes or do any of those things that take too much time and you know, inappropriate on a campus. So a neck, a tension release for the neck and the shoulders. Fifteen minutes, some ambient music. 

Our administrator set it up inside the library, the librarian was fantastic, she brought some cute ambient lighting and quiet music in and it was just fantastic. Fabulous. Now, of course,  we didn't want to go back to work, but it's okay. It was massively appreciated. So, if you have some money for a masseuse what about hiring a photographer  to go to the local park for the whole day and let people  Teachers sign up for, you know, 15, 20 minute slots, whatever you, the photographer think would be best you know, on a weekend or maybe even, you know, after school for a couple of nights, whatever, to go to a park and have photos with their families.

We all see these beautiful family photos, you know, on Instagram, Facebook, all those things. It's, it's out of budget for most teachers. What a beautiful thing to do. So I think that's a really nice idea or having a photographer. You know how we have those terrible, oh my gosh, it's such a joke, isn't it? That you know, when you have the school photos.

And  literally you have 10 seconds, they just take a picture of you, well, you know, your eyes are closed and you're busy trying to manage a line full of students while they're trying to take your school photo. And then it ends up on your badge and in the yearbook and like, Oh my God, this follow photos you around forever.

It's on the school website. And you're like, Oh my God, that's the worst picture of me ever. Right. So maybe just hire A real photographer, or maybe even just whoever your school uses, LifeTouch or whoever, to send somebody out  to take some time.  To take nice headshots for the staff. Okay, so all of those cost money.

So if you have money, those might be nice things. to do. The masseuse is this immediate payoff. The family photos in the park, the professional headshots. Those are things teachers will treasure for years. So those are some ideas. Now, what if you have no money? All right. How, here's some ideas. Okay. If you hang in here and until now.

Okay, you could have most principals and assistant principals and, you know, maybe some other special people on your staff have their own parking spot. Why don't you raffle off, like put all the teacher's names in a hat and for one month spot so you could have possibly, you know, 10 winners that a teacher gets the parking spot for a month, right?

That didn't cost you anything. That's kind of a bit of excitement. We all love a raffle. All right. So that's one idea.  How about if you have a PBIS room? Gosh, one of the schools I worked at had this amazing PBIS room for the kids. It had all kinds of games in it, you know, and it had you know, pinball machines, other kinds of stuff, but it also had a big screen TV with an what do you call it, an Xbox or something, Just Dance, all those things.

I mean, appropriate things. Why don't you let the teachers have the PBIS room for, you know, for a week? during lunch. They could go in and just have some fun like the kids do. Okay, usually when we're in there we're supervising our kids. So we want to just go and act like kids ourselves. So if you have a really fun PBIS room let the teachers have it for a week.

How about here's, here's a better use of a roving sub or it doesn't even need to be a roving sub. It's, you have a, Aids, instructional aids, support staff on campus. Here is a better way of giving teachers a break. It costs you nothing and it lets them hang out without having to prep anything. And it lets them hangout with their other Teacher Bestie friends.

And so this is why don't you get all the students in the multi purpose room watching a movie for joining me.  You could even make it educational if you felt so compelled. Bill Nye the science guy. Kids loving that. Right? Mythbusters. Whatever.  And have the support staff supervise them. Right? They can deal with the behavior issues right there.

Teachers don't need to prep for that. Now, I know if you have a really big school, how are they all going to fit in the multipurpose room? Well, then do it in shifts. Right? Even if you did four shifts during the day. No, three shifts. You could probably get all the kids in. You'll be putting them in with grades.

So that's great. Teachers can hang out with their grade level besties. Okay, so that's a free idea. What about another free idea? How about a classroom swap? Just something fun. If teachers want to swap with their other grade partners. I mean, the curriculum's the same. They don't really need to prep anything.

It could just be old fashion fun, right? They could, if they wanted to. You know, I, I can think of my other teaching team. I would have loved to have had their class for a day. I would have dressed up like that teacher. That's just who I am. Probably whoever was taking my spot would have worn a t shirt with like some kind of union Jack or something on it because of my accent.

Like just let the teachers have a bit of fun.  All right. So what were the takeaways admins  for the don'ts and the do's. So for the don'ts.  Basically it boils down to this. Make it sincere so not something you checked off the box, right? Make it timely. Don't wait till the week is over or till a parent reminds you, I know that should be obvious.

Don't try and stay away from the food. Sometimes that's, you know, it's hard to please everybody and it's not, it's. You know, it's easy for you, but it's not so great for everybody else. Okay. And just try and focus on fun, on sincerity. Use some of the ideas I shared about, there was plenty of things you could do for free.

And if you are a parent listening, I have to tell you just a couple of the sweetest things I ever got that I appreciated so much. One was a parent gave me a coupon for a car wash. Loved that. Loved it. Another parent called me at the beginning of the week and just told me, tell me what day of the week you want me to bring you some fast food or for wherever, kind of.

She was before DoorDash. She played DoorDasher for her kids parents. For her kids teachers, right? She just called us, tell me what day, tell me where you want to go and what you want to eat and I'll bring it to you and it will be ready right when lunch starts for you. And she just dropped it off and that was it.

And I thought that was really fabulous. It saved me. Packing something for the day it was something that I knew I wanted to eat. And then honestly, you know, all those love notes one child, it was my birthday, and she picked this, this enormous bouquet of flowers. I mean, they still had dirt attached to them.

So, you know, apologies to whichever garden they got pulled out of. Hopefully hers. It was the sweetest thing and she was wearing a really cute dress. She dressed up like it was Easter, like because it was a special day because it was my birthday. Now I do have to say every year on my birthday I got the kids ice cream.

We would have an ice cream party in the afternoon for my birthday. So maybe that's why she was dressing up. Maybe an older sibling had told her that was going to happen, but that was really cute. I just really enjoyed celebrating my birthday with my kids. And lastly,  and it happened more than once. You know, I, I did teach at a at a school where a high percentage of the students were low socioeconomic background, you know, whatever. 

And on more than one occasion, I got a blank gift card, which I didn't know until I went to Starbucks or whatever to use it, that there was like, Oh no, there's no money actually on this. Bless their heart. I'm like, that kid loved me enough or wanted to feel included enough. Cause that's something else you feel, you know, you feel terrible when kids bring you nice things and then, you know, other kids feel left out.

They like, they cared enough to go steal that for me. So I know that might not be appropriate, but that always kind of. Made me laugh and warmed my heart. So anyway, whatever happens next week, you are appreciated. Even if you feel people aren't showing it, I want you to know what you do matters. You have impact. 

It's important. And I want to let you know that I appreciate you tuning in and spending your time listening to me when you could be doing lots of other things with your time. But I do hope that you find these things helpful. Hey, you know what? Maybe share it with an admin just as a way to laugh.

And as always until next time, create your own path and bring your own sunshine.