Clovis' Mickey Cox students build digital lost-and-found, gain teamwork and tech skills

Students in Mickey Cox Elementary’s functional life skills class have converted the school’s old lost-and-found pile into a digital system that tags, photographs and posts items online for parents to claim. Special Education Teacher Casey Linnenkohl said, “It's kind of insane how much the kids lose on campus, and it would just get piled into a giant bin,” describing the move away from the previous one-bin approach.

The new workflow is hands-on and stepwise: each lost item receives a tag, a student photographs the item with an iPad, the items are hung up on a rack on campus, and the entries are posted to a virtual lost-and-found that is linked by QR codes placed around Mickey Cox. The school also includes the listing in its newsletter so parents can view items from home. Linnenkohl noted a practical benefit for families: “Lots of parents who can't get to the school during the hours that they're allowed to go in and look at it, this has made it a lot easier for them to be able to claim their kids' stuff.”

Third- through sixth-grade students with different disabilities take part in every step of the project, and the classroom team packages and delivers claimed items directly to students' classrooms. One classroom moment captured the instructional use of technology: when Linnenkohl asked, “JJ, what do you have? What color?” JJ clicked a button on his iPad, and it read off the word “grey.” Another student, JP, summarized a routine task: “My favorite part is hanging up the clothes because, well, it's pretty simple.”

Clovis Unified School District materials identify the program with the brand name Cowboy Closet. The district page invites families with the line, “Has your student forgotten something at school? Check out our Cowboy Closet (click on the link above), our brand new Lost and Found!” That branding ties the Mickey Cox initiative into the school’s online resources alongside digital literacy and parent engagement tools.

Linnenkohl emphasized the project’s classroom and community effects beyond reuniting items with owners. “I think it's really opened the eyes of a lot of students and teachers on campus, and staff and parents to see that all the things that they can do instead of things that they can't do. It's focusing on the positive.” The students have “taken ownership of their new role,” organizing every lost item and managing the logistics of delivery when a parent claims an item.

The digital lost-and-found at Mickey Cox provides a concrete short-term service and a skills-building exercise: QR-linked listings and newsletter posts make item retrieval more accessible for parents, while students practice technology use, tagging and teamwork. The program continues to operate on campus with the rack, QR signage and student-led packaging and delivery serving as the day-to-day mechanism for returning lost items and demonstrating the capabilities of the functional life skills class.