Clothes and shoes are the most common items to turn up in lost and found, and it's statistically impossible to say whether new or already used items are forgotten more often.

"A bit of both," acknowledged Tallinn Kuristiku High School principal Aivi Osman. "Some of these shoes look like they've only been worn once or twice. There's even brand-name stuff, like Nikes and Reeboks. It seems odd that nobody is missing them."

"Of course, there are also things left behind that aren't in good enough shape to donate," noted Gustav Adolf High School principal Henrik Salum. "Maybe that's because it's convenient to leave them somewhere for someone else to deal with."

Typically, when someone loses their phone or some other important gadget, they notice immediately. But not always.

"What looked to us like a very new phone had been forgotten somewhere, and we couldn't find the owner," Salum recalled. The school's administrative manager even specifically took the phone to a telecom location to determine the phone's number, so the school could notify its owner. "And then we found out that the student was already on their third phone since this one. In maybe three months."

Most schools across the country take a similar approach to unclaimed items – those that are in too bad of shape are thrown away, while things in good condition are donated.

"Either before winter break or summer vacation, the [school] board of trustees and parents' committee take it upon themselves to gather up, sort, clean and donate these things to second-hand stores," explained Merivälja School activities coordinator Maarja Doyle. "Recently, they've donated them to the Harju County Association of Large Families or in support of refugees from Ukraine."

Sign of the times?

Before that point, however, considerable efforts are made to reunite the items with their owners. Parents are sent photos, and the items are even put on display. Merivälja School even organized one such display for their school Christmas fair; the clothes and shoes were placed out on the school steps and on tables and handrails.

"This stirred up quite a bit of excitement," Doyle recalled. "And actually, a lot of stuff was recognized [by their owners] – more easily than when flipping through a photo gallery."

All of this, however, demands a lot of time and effort from the school staff.

"Children ask their teachers, and often go looking for things together with their teacher, and then parents write us," said Osman. "Then our school counselor goes looking for things too. It's actually quite the burden to gather up all these things here and store them in a manageable way."

While some lost items quickly find their way back to their owners, such large piles of unclaimed things also likely reflect that Estonian society is actually doing fairly well.

"It's probably the fact that we live in a relatively affluent society," Salum reflected. "I come from a time when clothes and things weren't so readily available. So my generation values things differently than today's generation. It's only human to forget things; of course, it happens. Perhaps it's a question of mindset – how much are we producing stuff that just ends up sitting somewhere?"

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