MANCHESTER — A silver slipper. A lumpy lot of gray, black, and blue sweat shirts, fleece and down jackets. A lone Minnie Mouse sock.
Behold the contents of the lost-and-found bins next to the main office and outside of the cafeteria at Manchester Essex Middle High School. With just days left in the school year, the boxes are overflowing — and seldom visited.
“I’m really not surprised that kids lose all of this stuff,” said Paul F. Murphy, the assistant principal at the high school. “Their minds are all over the place, and they’re moving 100 different ways.”
As the academic year ends, students leave behind motley remnants of their lives. School administrators across the state are trying to reunite students with misplaced clothing, shoes, lunch boxes, water bottles, notebooks, binders, glasses, jewelry, headphones, keys, and computer accessories.
In Manchester, Murphy has reminded students twice a day on the public address system to check the bins.
At Revere High School, principal Lourenco Garcia said that at least half of the lost items will go unclaimed this month and whatever’s left — mostly glasses, jackets, and sweat shirts — will be given to a charity.
“At the end of last year, we had a teacher who brought the glasses to Nicaragua and donated them,” Garcia said.
At Wellesley High School, Diane Zinck is preparing to neatly fold all of the lost garments into bags and donate them to a charity. Zinck, who is a secretary in the principal’s office, said most students misplace things in the school cafeteria and theorized that they are losing more jackets than ever before.
The reason: “One of the biggest things is that kids aren’t utilizing the storage space of their lockers anymore,” Zinck said.
Murphy, an educator in Manchester for more than 20 years, concurred.
“I would probably agree with that,” he said. “Not all of the kids use their lockers here, and they stuff their jackets into their book bags.”
Outside of Murphy’s office Friday, students raced through the main hallway on their way to lunch. They gripped cellphones and padded lunch boxes, lugged multicolored backpacks, and chatted excitedly as they ran by the six cardboard lost-and-found boxes.
Per Hostage, a freshman from Essex, sat on a smooth blond wooden bench near the school’s main entrance and admitted that he’s been losing sweat shirts for as long as he can remember.
“I don’t know where I lost them, that’s why I can’t find them,” Hostage said, in a Zen-like defense. “My parents aren’t too happy about it. Every time I get something new, they just tell me not to lose it, and I just hope I don’t.”
Annalise Mora, a freshman from Manchester, has been luckier than Hostage. Earlier this year, she lost a heart-shaped necklace and a sweat shirt and found both in the lost-and-found bins. She believes some students would rather do something else than search the bins for their lost items.
“A lot of kids are lazy, and I don’t think a lot of them take the time to search,” she said.
Pam Beaudoin, Manchester Essex superintendent, who sat nearby in the main hallway, waxed philosophical on the loss of so much stuff. “It’s a disposable society,” Beaudoin said.
Like other educators interviewed at the school, she did not judge the students and said the brimming lost-and-found bins are part of a change in culture.
“If they’re not in great need of it and have a means of replacing it, it may not be something that they lose a lot of sleep over,” she said.
Marion Powers, an art teacher at the Manchester Essex High School, is holding out hope that some of her students who left sweat shirts and jackets in her room will claim them. Instead of bringing them to the lost-and-found bins, she’s hung the clothes in her class for the students to see. To date, she’s had no takers.
“I’m stumped,” she said. “They just walk by them. Their minds are on other things.”
Some of the lost items:
Steven Rosenberg can be reached at srosenberg@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @WriteRosenberg.