In a tan room, in the police department on the outskirts of the FAU Boca campus, are 25 bicycles, 15 flash drives, 13 textbooks and one pair of fuzzy animal slippers – and a bunch of other junk. These items belong to students and they won’t get them back, unless they hurry up and claim them.
Some of these items sit on dusty shelves waiting to be claimed by their owners, while others are already safely packed in big, brown boxes waiting to be sold off, at an auction hosted by FAU’s Lost and Found.
At least two to three times per year, the Lost and Found holds an auction at the FAU Boca Raton campus to sell all the stuff that students didn’t claim. The auction is outside, near the police station on the other side of campus, and it is open to anybody that wants to attend it.
“[After 30 days] we put anything that hasn’t been claimed, and is of any value, in the auction for people to bid on it,” says Patricia Harris, community service office supervisor at the FAU Police Department. “All money that we make on the auction goes straight to FAU’s funds for scholarships.”
The money goes to scholarships, though, Harris wasn’t sure exactly what scholarships.
“The money all goes to FAU, we never keep any of it,” says Harris. “And it just goes to scholarships that FAU offers to students.”
The auction earlier this year, on April 3, made almost $1,000 – though only 100 people showed up, and very few of them were students, says Harris.
“Not a lot of students show up,” says Harris, “which was surprising to me because you’d think they’d be interested in this – to buy things for cheap prices.”
Even though the auctions are advertised on the Police Department’s Web site, students are not all aware that these auctions happen. Some students complain that the auctions aren’t advertised well enough and say if they were more, students would go to them.
“I didn’t even know they existed,” says Rachel Denninson, a second-year business student at FAU. “I mean, I practically live in thrift stores trying to find cheap things, and if I would have known this was going on earlier, I would have definitely attended.”
The Lost and Found isn’t all money and auctions – it’s a system that is designed for students to use when they lose something and have no other resources to find it.
“A lot of departments bring the lost items here [to the police station], because we are the main Lost and Found,” says Harris. “Then, anything that comes to the Police Department has to be written up on a property voucher, so that if the owner comes we have it on record.”
The Lost and Found could be perceived as a mini garage sale, but it’s not easy to just go to the police station and find the items laying around in an open room and choose and pick whatever you like.
“If somebody comes to us saying that they lost something, they have to describe the specific item, and then the dispatcher will proceed to go through the property book and see if the description matches anything in there,” says Harris.
The Lost and Found also features a list of updated items on their Web site, for students and faculty members to check if the item they have lost is there.
“The Lost and Found is kind of cool, now that I know about it,” says Denninson. “At least now I know of a place of where to look for my stuff and those auctions seem to be pretty rad.”
Breaking down the Lost and Found
On the University Police Web site, the Lost and Found inventory is updated so students and faculty know what they currently have. This bar graph shows just a few of the numerous items in the Lost and Found for the month of July.
Did you know FAU has a lost and found?
We polled 50 students and asked if they knew if FAU had a Lost and Found. Surprisingly, 38 students were confused and didn’t know there was one, while 12 other students knew where it was located.
On the Lost and Found Web site, it says there is an auction held every month, but that is wrong according to Pat Harris. The next auction should be in the first week of October. For more information, contact Harris at (561) 297-2174.
