I have personally been a victim of the Fresno State lost and found system, and let me tell you, you do not want to lose an item in the Lab School.

For those unaware, the Lab School is the set of buildings you can find north of Keats Avenue, right next to the Kremen School of Education and Human Development.

In the spring of 2025, I took a Spanish class in the Lab School, where I had accidentally left a bag of clothes I was supposed to take with me to Kingsburg that weekend.

It was not until later that I realized I lost my bag. In a panic, I checked the college’s lost and found policies. I was relieved to see that lost items were held in a department office before being sent to the University Warehouse, which will dispose of items within a week unless they are valued over $300.

When I got back to college after the weekend, I was met with one problem: there was no department office for the Lab School. No one at the time even knew if there was one for the area.

Then I was directed to facilities management, which, if you don’t know, is on the north side of the campus. The walk was full of anxiety and hope that surely they still had my favorite sweater.

Sadly, the truth is they didn’t. The lady at the desk was the most helpful person. She called the warehouse, took my information and tried her best to figure out if any custodians had come into contact with my bag of clothes.

After this, I had told my friends, jokingly, how Fresno State doesn’t seem to have a real lost and found, and they all agreed. Some talked about how they also had lost certain personal items.

It made me think about how, at least, other buildings have a department office, but the Lab School doesn’t have one. Perhaps they share one with Kremen, but if they do, then nobody knows about it.

All of this was brought to my attention again in my internship, where I saw a sign about a lost and found in the Lab School.

I was overjoyed! I knew there was no way my clothes were still there, but there was vindication in knowing that maybe other students found their lost personal treasures.

This was just for me to feel broken again, because when I asked more about it, I was told that the lost and found I had hoped for stopped existing after the pandemic.

At this point, the Lab Building staff needs to team together and find an office to house people’s missing items before they are sent to the shredder that is the University Warehouse.

If you look at the Fresno State website policy on lost and found, my clothes were likely immediately donated or tossed over the weekend that I was gone, since there was no building to even hold my lost clothes for a few days.

Not to mention that personal items, such as phones, keys and wallets, only last a week. So you need to act fast before you lose belongings you can’t replace.

Is it not a little ridiculous that the time between losing an item, whether of great value or not, is treated like a ticking time bomb that students need to attend to immediately? If you don’t manage to cut the wire in time, your favorite hat is suddenly up in flames.

Fresno State needs a more lax lost and found policy, where if you lost something on Wednesday, you can still manage to grab it the Monday of next week, without a worry that it could be shipped off and disposed of that Thursday.

So heed my warning, fellow students: if you lose an item, do not lose it in the Lab School.