Students can’t find lost and founds
Last fall, Utah State University student Jen Jones lost a TI-86 calculator. She thought she lost it in the Science Engineering Research Building. When she did not find it there she checked at least six other buildings before being referred to the police station.
To this day she still has no idea where that calculator is.
Jones said the hardest part about the experience was not trying to locate her calculator, but trying to locate the various lost and founds in each building.
“I didn’t even know who to talk to,” Jones said. “Even if someone found it, they wouldn’t have known where to turn it in … if you don’t know, you’re less willing to turn it in.”
This is a problem many students are having and one USU is trying to correct.
Several weeks ago, Ombudsman Committee member Erin Forsberg attended the Public Affairs soap box carrying a notebook. She took note of all complaints pertaining to campus. One complaint in particular caught her attention: the lack of a campuswide lost and found.
Forsberg, along with Associated Students of USU Student Advocate Les Essig, Vice President of Student Services Gary Chambers, and USU Police Chief Steve Mecham, have come up with possible solutions to the problem.
The first possibility would be to select one location to serve as a campuswide lost and found. The difficult part is finding a place large enough to securely store all the lost items. If such a place were found, the issue of funding such a facility would require additional student fees.
An alternative to this idea is to create a Web-based lost and found.
“It’s in complete research mode,” Forsberg said.
She said she believes that it is a very possible solution.
This idea would require each building to have one centralized lost and found specifically for items found in that building. Each day, accumulated items would be entered into the database lost and found. Students searching for lost items would only have to visit one lost and found location where someone would run a query based on specific details.
To prevent theft, access to the database would be limited to the few who work at the lost and found stations and the USU Information Center.
Forsberg plans to have a proposal for this project within the next couple of weeks but said it will be months before anything is decided on.
-tamber@cc.usu.edu