Alisa Nudar was in the middle of her math exam when she realized she had unexpectedly started her period.
Nudar raised her hand and asked for permission to go to the bathroom. When she got there, she found that she had bled through her underwear. She didn’t have any period products with her, and there were none in the bathroom. “I kept asking people who were coming in and they were, like, Oh, I’m so sorry, I don’t have any,” Nudar said. “And already 10 minutes had passed.”
She walked out of the bathroom looking for a better solution and bumped into a friend who ran back to her classroom to get one of her own pads.
All of that searching took about 15 minutes, Nudar said — wasted time that she could have put into her exam. Back then, in 2021, Nudar was a freshman at Bard High School Early College in New York City. And legally there should have been tampons and pads in the school bathroom, provided for free by the New York City Department of Education.
Now a nonprofit organization called Period Law and an anonymous student are suing the Education Department for not providing those products in schools, a failure that, according to the legal complaint, effectively amounts to discrimination against menstruating people.
In 2016, New York City became the first jurisdiction in the country to pass a law mandating every school to be stocked with free period products. The law paved the way for other legislators to pass their own versions of a similar law. Today, 28 states and the District of Columbia have laws on free period products in schools.
In the years since, however, implementation in New York has been weak and inconsistent, said Laura Strausfeld, founder and executive director of Period Law, which was instrumental in crafting the law. The failure makes it seem as though period products are an optional benefit rather than a necessity akin to toilet paper or soap, Strausfeld said. “No kid is sitting in class worried whether there will be toilet paper in the bathroom — that is where a lack of access to menstrual products is discriminating against menstruators.” Filing this lawsuit at a time when equity initiatives are being scaled back across the country is an attempt to keep the issue front and center, Strausfeld said, rather than let it get “back burnered.”
Research has consistently found that lack of access to menstrual products can result in students’ missing school or class, affecting their overall performance.
According to the legal complaint, vague language from the city’s Education Department has made the law logistically difficult for schools to follow. For example, after the law passed, the department installed menstrual product dispensers in school bathrooms but didn’t clarify who should refill them and how new supplies would be paid for. There is also no data on whether or not dispensers were installed in all schools.
Anecdotally, Strausfeld found that there often isn’t even awareness of the law, and that students and school staff continue to try to fill the gaps.“I know principals and teachers who are still buying products that they know their students will use from discretionary funding, or from their own funds, or from raising money on DonorsChoose and other crowdfunding sites,” she said. In 2018, a group of Brooklyn-based Girl Scouts conducted their own two-year investigation in two school districts and found that more than 80 percent of public middle schools there failed to provide either products or sanitary bins.
In a 2024 report, the Education Department stated that all schools were stocked with period supplies during the 2023-24 year, but didn’t provide evidence or documentation. The department declined to comment on specifics of the case, and a representative stated in an email that the department would “respond in the litigation.”
Other states have also had patchy success. Most either mandate period products without providing funding, or set aside funding without mandating the products, placing the burden on schools to apply for supplies, said Lacey Gero, director of government relations at Alliance for Period Supplies, a national network of nonprofit menstrual organizations that track state laws. Oftentimes, in many of these states, data on progress and compliance is hard to find.
And many states don’t have effective enforcement measures in their laws, Gero added. For example, the responsibility of restocking dispensers, if they are installed, often falls to schools’ maintenance staff, and relies on students to report when the dispensers are empty.
After the experience of missing part of her exam to search for menstrual products, Nudar, now 18, started a student club, pushing her school to keep its bathrooms stocked with supplies. The group got the Department of Education to install dispensers. Every time the dispensers run out, students have to go to the main office to ask for them to be refilled, Nudar said.
“The school was really helpful on that — but, like, the fact that I had to do all this?” she said. “It’s draining and time-consuming.”
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