ABANDONED TREASURES CHARITIES BENEFIT FROM SCHOOLS' LOST, FOUND LEFTOVERS.

Byline: Carol Rock Staff Writer

CANYON COUNTRY - Karen Rupert opened a large cupboard Thursday in the attendance office at Canyon High School, letting loose an avalanche of jackets, shirts and shoes, along with a couple of backpacks and a lone blanket.

Two smaller boxes sat on a desk, overflowing with keys, prescription glasses, empty wallets, a commuter mug, a computer disc, one walkie- talkie and a New American Standard Bible.

At Pinetree Community School in Canyon Country, lunch boxes vie for space in the attendance office and janitor's closet.

It doesn't seem to matter how old the students are. There are always hundreds of items abandoned on local campuses at the end of the school year, and they end up benefiting local charities.

``We notify the kids every day in the bulletin to come see if anything is theirs,'' Rupert said. ``And some kids come in and look. A few. But I have 3,000 kids. We get enough left here to have it picked up four times a year.''

A volunteer from a local charity collects abandoned items and washes the usable clothing before passing it on. But office workers can't believe some of the things left behind by the students.

``Here are clickers on some of the key chains,'' said Rupert, holding up at least a dozen sets of car keys and house keys on a variety of chains. ``Wouldn't you miss something like that? How do these kids get home? It makes us wonder.''

She said the band department is one of the largest contributors to the closet. She muses that students leave behind clothing in favor of their instruments.

The most unusual abandoned item was a dental retainer, sitting at the bottom of the box next to a Chuck E. Cheese key chain. The dental retainer will go into the trash at the end of the year.

Just the type of items, not the volume, seems to differ at elementary schools.

``We have mostly lunch boxes,'' said Jan Evans, office manager at Pinetree. ``Usually, they're empty when we find them. We always look for names. And there's a lot of clothing: jackets, sweat shirts. You know how kids strip off their clothes when they go outside.''

Evans keeps the smaller items in the office with her, but the bulky stuff goes out with the custodian to be stored in a larger area. She has found cell phones, glasses and jewelry, while other school workers have reported seeing strollers and even a small artificial Christmas tree in the collection areas.

``We send home a note to the parents to come in every now and then, telling them that what doesn't get claimed will go to charity,'' Evans said. ``Sometimes we put the clothing in the (American) Cancer Society bin, or Girl Scouts will do a clothing drive and we'll give it to them.''

At La Mesa Junior High, attendance clerk Donna Wright said that her bins overflow with more jackets than anything else.

``I have a 20-gallon tub behind my desk that gets emptied once a week,'' she said. ``The campus supervisor takes everything from me and stores it where we have more room. At the end of the year, we give everything to charity.''

Since uniforms are required at La Mesa, any uniform pieces are cleaned and kept in the office for students who might forget theirs or have an accident. Wright said that she once found a pair of pants and wondered what the student who lost them was wearing.

``We have a few keys and a few cell phones,'' she said, checking out the items in the box. ``And we have a pair of glasses with a dollar bill wrapped around them. So we've got a student out there who can't see and didn't get lunch that day.''

Aside from a couple of bags of ``old stinky gym clothes,'' Wright said that there aren't too many unusual items left at the end of the year. She recalled that some valuable bracelets went unclaimed in the past and were included in that semester's charitable donation.

When the office staff at Canyon heard that pictures of lost-and-found items are put on some schools' Web pages, they laughed.

``That would be a full-time job,'' Rupert said.

Carol Rock, [phone]

carol.rock(at)dailynews.com

CAPTION(S):

3 photos

Photo:

(1 -- color) A student hurries past a jumble of lost-and-found jackets at Canyon High School, where most unclaimed items will go to charities.

(2 -- color) Even a dental retainer is among goods abandoned at Canyon High. It will go into the trash unless claimed.

(3) Keys, a glove, cell phone and other lost goods are typical of things students regularly leave behind on campus.

David Crane/Staff Photographer