Why Period Products Aren’t Widely Provided in Schools

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.

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