Sixth-Graders Find Treasure While Helping Clean Lake

(USA) - Sixth-grade students at St. Paul's Episcopal School in Oakland, Calif. weren't looking to be thanked when they volunteered to pick up garbage around a local lake as part of a school cleanup project on Thursday.

But one 11-year-old girl pulling bags of trash from the water seemed to get a cosmic reward when she spotted two bags sticking out of the lake that ended up being filled with over 100 pieces of antique jewelry, foreign coins, rings, bracelets, and even military medals, the Associated Press reports.

"I think (the items) belong to different people and are from different parts of the world. There were rings of different sizes. Coins with pictures of Christ and others with a picture of a menorah. A lot of diversity," the student told the Oakland Tribune, requesting that her name not be published in case the items were involved in a crime.

Students at St. Paul's Episcopal, who help clean the lake every Thursday as part of a long-standing community service project at the school, said they usually find wallets, cell phones, and clothing items while cleaning.

"We find a lot of stuff, a lot of tennis balls and things, but no, never that," one sixth-grader told the San Francisco Chronicle. "It was basically the best thing we ever found in there."

As students might have expected, police confiscated the items in order to do an investigation and hopefully return them to their rightful owners. (Huffingtonpost.com)