PTOKit Lost & Found
Available nowThe lost-and-found bin every family can see from the parking lot
Someone photographs the bin in seconds. Every family can look from home. A claim turns into a slip that puts the jacket in the right classroom — and when the season ends, the leftovers become a donation manifest instead of a mystery pile.
Billed annually · one price for the whole school · cancel anytime
The problem
The pain was never storing the photos
A shared album already shows parents pictures of the pile, and the best-run schools already do it. What an album cannot do is close the loop.
Nobody can see the bin
Parents cannot get past the sign-in desk at ten in the morning, and children do not look.
Named things sit there anyway
A jacket with a name inside waits in the bin next to the unlabelled ones until the purge.
A parent spots it — then what?
Email the teacher, hope the office finds it, hope nobody else took it first.
The purge is a guess
The truck fills anyway, and nobody knows what went home versus what was donated.
The idea that makes it work
An item with a name on it does not need a bin. It needs to go to Room 12.
Schools tell families to write a name and a room number on everything — and then put the labelled jackets in the same pile as everything else. This product forks them at intake. A named item never appears on the public gallery; it goes onto the next classroom delivery with a printed slip, which is where the return rate actually lives.
That fork is also the privacy answer. The name is a private field, used to verify a claim and printed on paper, never rendered on a page a stranger can open.
What it does
Six jobs, in the order they happen
📷
Log
A shutter and two taps from any phone. Lots, valuables and named items are all handled at intake — no typing.
👀
Show
A school-branded page with photos, category and colour chips, and search. No app, no login, works on an old phone.
🙋
Claim
A family says it is theirs and how their student will collect it. Valuables ask for a description first.
🏫
Hand back
Hold tags for the window, return slips grouped by teacher, and a counter where the kid just says the number.
📦
Close
One screen proposes what to do with every item, then moves them all and prints the manifest.
📊
Prove
The year in numbers, including whether asking families to label things actually worked.
For the people who touch the bin
The office never makes a password
The PTO buys it and gets the console. The secretary, the custodian and the sort-day crew work from a link that opens the camera, the counter and a sweep — and nothing else. Issued by name, revoked in a click, and the log always says who logged what.
For the school's own megaphone
We write the words; you send them
This product never emails the parent body. ParentSquare, Bloomz or your newsletter already reach every family. Two weeks before each donation date, you get a paragraph with the counts, the deadline and six thumbnails, ready to paste.
What it deliberately does not do
- It does not email your parent body. Your school already has a channel that reaches everyone; a second one would be ignored and resented.
- It does not ship items or take payments. The lost-property systems built for airports do. A school bin is a walk to the office.
- It does not give parents accounts. Claims, watches and questions are a link and an email address. Nothing to sign up for, nothing to forget.
- It does not integrate with your student information system. A teacher field and a first name are all it needs, and all it will ever hold.
- It does not replace the bin. The items and the pickup stay physical. It replaces the not-knowing.
One price
$79 a year
For the whole school — every item, every family, every donation day. The systems sold to airports and universities start near $1,000 a year for one location.
Already built your kit? Its answers become the settings — paste the link when you set up.
Questions
How long does it take to log the bin?
About ten seconds an item after the shutter: a category chip, a colour chip, save. A "same as last" toggle repeats the tags for a stack of grey hoodies, and one photo can cover a lot of identical water bottles.
What about glasses, keys and phones?
Valuables are a separate lane. They are listed as a card with the category and date but never a photo, and a family claiming one has to describe it before the office hands it over. Schools already do this informally; here it is the default.
Can families ask to be told when something turns up?
Yes, and it is the feature parents notice. A family says what they are missing; when a matching item is logged, they get one email with the photo — usually the same morning. It turns the twice-a-year blast into a nudge aimed at one person.
Do we have to use it for the whole year?
It is billed annually, and the rhythm is a school year: donation dates, reminders, a manifest, a report. You can cancel anytime; your item log downloads as a CSV.