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.”
