A Policy Proposal · NYC Department of Education
FlowForAll
Nine years after New York City promised free period products in every 6th–12th grade bathroom, thousands of students still go without. This is a proposal to finally fund the promise.
Background
Period poverty is the struggle to afford or access menstrual products, safe hygiene facilities, and basic education about menstruation. It sounds like a small logistical problem. It isn't — it's an attendance problem, a dignity problem, and ultimately an equity problem.
When a student doesn't have a pad or tampon, the options are bad ones: use toilet paper or a sock, ask a stranger, sit through class in fear of leaking, or go home. Nationally, research on menstrual health has repeatedly linked lack of access to missed class time, lower classroom concentration, and increased anxiety around attendance during a student's period. For a population already navigating puberty, that's an unnecessary barrier stacked on top of everything else school asks of them.
New York City was first. In 2016, NYC became the first locality in the United States to pass a law requiring public schools to stock free menstrual products in bathrooms — years ahead of most of the country.
Local Law 18 (2016) requires that all NYC public schools serving grades 6–12 provide free menstrual products in student bathrooms, at no cost, without students having to ask a nurse or teacher. New York State followed in 2018, extending the requirement statewide, and expanded it again in 2023 to cover private schools. The law was a genuine milestone in menstrual equity policy — the question this proposal asks is whether it's actually working on the ground.
The Current Problem
Nine years after Local Law 18 passed, compliance is still the exception, not the rule.
In March 2025, the advocacy group Period Law sued the NYC Department of Education, alleging it has "consistently failed to deliver" on its legal obligation under Local Law 18. The lawsuit followed years of complaints: at a 2023 City Council hearing, multiple lawmakers said they had personally visited schools and found empty dispensers or no products at all. The suit also documented eighteen separate cases from 2024–2025 of teachers running crowdfunding campaigns out of pocket to buy pads and tampons for their students.
A student survey cited in the lawsuit found that 85% of NYC high schoolers said they still lacked reliable access to menstrual products at school — not because the law doesn't exist, but because it isn't being enforced.
Is every school complying?
No. An earlier 2018 audit by a Brooklyn Girl Scout troop found only 18% of the middle schools they surveyed across two districts actually met the law's standard of stocked bathrooms with disposal bins. Anecdotal reports since suggest the pattern hasn't meaningfully changed.
Why do schools run out?
Because there's no dedicated funding stream — see the Policy Gap below. Products get purchased ad hoc, out of general school budgets that are already stretched, which means restocking depends heavily on which staff member remembers and how much is left after everything else.
Are Title I schools hit harder?
This is a genuinely open research question worth tracking district by district — but the mechanism is intuitive: schools with fewer discretionary dollars and higher per-student need have less room to absorb an unfunded mandate.
Do boroughs differ?
Also under-documented citywide. Compliance data isn't published at the school or district level in a way that lets the public compare boroughs — which is itself part of the accountability gap this proposal addresses.
The Numbers
The scale of who's affected, and how thin the money already is.
None of these figures answer the exact question of "how many sick days per year does period poverty cause in NYC" — that number doesn't appear to be tracked at the city level yet, which is itself a data gap worth flagging to the Council. What the numbers do show clearly: the students most likely to attend a school without a supply cushion are also the students Local Law 18 was written to protect.
What Already Exists
Real progress has been made. It's just been left unfunded.
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2016
Local Law 18 passes — NYC becomes the first U.S. locality to require free menstrual products in public school bathrooms, grades 6–12.
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2018
New York State extends the requirement to all public schools statewide, grades 6–12.
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2023
The City Council passes a broader menstrual equity package — including a bill from Council Member Carmen De La Rosa expanding the age range DOE must serve, and a bill from Council Member Tiffany Cabán requiring inclusive "menstrual product" language across city documents. The package directs DOE to start reporting on product provision and monitoring its own compliance.
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2023
State law is expanded again to cover private schools.
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2024
NYC Public Schools and the Commission on Gender Equity publish Know Your Period: The NYC Student Guide, translated into every NYCPS language, laying out students' rights to period products and how to report a school that isn't complying.
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2025
Period Law sues the DOE, alleging nine years of inconsistent enforcement.
Council Member Julie Won, District 26
Representing Sunnyside, Long Island City, Woodside, and Astoria, Council Member Won chairs the Committee on Workforce Development and sits on the Committees on Contracts, Public Housing, Technology, and Transportation. Her legislative record is centered on equity in city systems — procurement transparency, contracting fairness, and access-oriented reforms that affect underserved communities. Menstrual equity sits squarely in that lane: it's a resourcing and accountability problem inside a public system, which is exactly the kind of gap her committee work is built to close.
Other council members have led directly on this issue: Tiffany Cabán and Carmen De La Rosa sponsored the 2023 package, and Amanda Farias convened the December 2023 press conference announcing it. The legal and legislative groundwork is there. What's missing is money and a mechanism to make sure it reaches every bathroom, every semester.
The Policy Gap
Local Law 18 says schools must provide products. It never said DOE would pay for them in any trackable way — and that's the hole this proposal fills.
No dedicated budget line
DOE's $44.6 billion budget has no line item for menstrual products. They're expected to appear, funded from wherever an individual school finds room.
Purchased from different budgets, school to school
One school might buy pads out of its general supply budget, another out of PTA fundraising, another not at all. There's no consistency in how it's paid for, let alone how much.
Compliance isn't consistently monitored
The 2023 Council package directed DOE to start reporting on this — but the 2025 lawsuit alleges that reporting and enforcement still aren't happening in any systematic way.
No accountability when schools fail to stock products
There's a feedback form for students to flag empty dispensers, but no penalty, audit cycle, or public dashboard that would tell the Council which schools are actually failing.
Higher-need schools need more, not the same
A flat, unfunded mandate treats a well-resourced school in a high-income district the same as a Title I school serving hundreds more students with a fraction of the discretionary budget.
The Proposal
Fund Local Law 18 like the law it already is.
- Allocate $2 million annually within the NYC DOE budget as a dedicated, trackable line item for menstrual products — not folded into general supply funds.
- Prioritize Title I schools in the distribution formula, so schools with the least discretionary budget and highest need are funded first and most fully.
- Supply high-quality menstrual products — not the thinnest, cheapest option available, which students have specifically cited as a reason they avoid using what's provided.
- Require annual compliance reports from every school district, published in a format the Council and the public can actually review, closing the accountability gap that's persisted since 2016.
Budget Analysis
"How much will this cost, and how do we pay for it?" — the question every policymaker asks first.
Why $2 million?
It's a number sized to be real, not symbolic. Spread across DOE's roughly 1,600 Title I schools, it's enough to fund consistent restocking without requiring a fight over billions in a $44.6B budget — the kind of ask that's realistic to win in a single budget cycle.
Cost per student
Divided across the 642,772 students in Title I school-wide programs, $2 million works out to roughly $3.11 per student per year — less than the cost of a single box of tampons at retail.
Compared to the DOE budget
$2 million is about 0.0045% of DOE's $44.6 billion FY2026 budget, and about 0.24% of the $847 million already spent on Title I funding in FY2025 — a rounding error next to what the City already allocates for equity-focused programming.
Possible funding sources
Reallocation within DOE's existing Title I set-aside; the City Council's discretionary equity funding streams (the same mechanism that funded the 2023 menstrual equity package's reporting mandate); or a public–private match with partners like the Alliance for Period Supplies to stretch City dollars further.
For comparison: the City's Fiscal 2025 adopted budget included over $112.4 billion citywide, with more than a billion dollars in restored Council priorities alone. A $2 million line item for menstrual equity is proportionally small — and directly closes a gap the City has already legislated against twice.
Expected Impact
Increased attendance
Removing a preventable reason to miss class or leave early during a period.
Improved student dignity
No more relying on a teacher's personal crowdfunding campaign, or going without.
Real compliance with Local Law 18
A law nine years old finally backed by a budget line and a reporting requirement with teeth.
More equitable access citywide
Consistent supply regardless of borough, district, or how well-resourced an individual school happens to be.
Sources
A running bibliography — update this as the research develops.
- NYC Public Schools — Menstrual Products for Students
- NYCPS Data at a Glance (2024–25 enrollment & demographics)
- NYC Public Schools Budget, FY2026
- NYC Council — 2023 Menstrual Equity Legislative Package (press release)
- NYC Council Finance Division — DOE Budget Report, FY2026 Preliminary Plan
- NYS Comptroller — Title I Federal Funds to NYC LEAs
- Chalkbeat New York — "Menstrual inequity: NYC schools sued" (March 2025)
- "A Policy for Addressing Menstrual Equity in Schools" — NYC case study (PMC)
- NY Public Health Law §267 — Menstrual Products in Schools
- Alliance for Period Supplies — Menstrual Equity Legislation Tracker
- Council Member Julie Won — Legislative Record, District 26
Note: some figures cited throughout this site (borough-by-borough compliance, sick-day counts attributable specifically to period poverty) are flagged as open research questions because they don't yet appear to be published anywhere at the city level. That gap is itself worth raising with DOE and the Council.
Partnerships
This doesn't have to wait on a budget cycle to start making a dent.
Alliance for Period Supplies
The Alliance for Period Supplies coordinates a national network of allied programs that distribute donated menstrual products to people who need them, working alongside PERIOD. to push for menstrual equity legislation across the country.
Joining their allied program network is a concrete first step for this project: it opens a pipeline for donated product to reach NYC schools directly, independent of whether or when the $2 million budget line gets approved — proof of concept while the policy case is being made.
Explore the Allied Programs Network ↗