STANDING UP FOR PEERS
Student pushes for equality
In the not too distant future, female students in the public school board will be able to access free menstrual hygiene products in relative privacy.
Anumita Jain, a student trustee from Massey, led an initiative to have those products available in washrooms at both the secondary and elementary level and her efforts were rewarded this week when the Greater Essex County District School Board’s trustees passed a motion to that effect.
The target date for having dispensers in all 70 schools is 2022.
“This is a big step taken towards increasing equity in education by the GECDSB and it’s the type of good news I think everyone could use a little more of right now,” said Jain, a Grade 12 Massey student.
Through the generosity of the Windsor Goodfellows, tampons, pads and deodorant are available for free at all public schools but a student must go to the office or the teacher in charge to request the products.
“What the Goodfellows do for us is so much appreciated,” said board superintendent Sharon Pyke, who oversees the distribution of their donation.
“It’s reaching a different population.”
Pyke said having washroom dispensers is more about accessing feminine products “without stigma.”
As a member of the Ontario Student Trustee Association who cochaired a student well-being lobby group, Jain and her cohorts started looking into how to improve student access to feminine hygiene products five months ago.
At an OSTA conference, she had heard about a similar effort by a Thames Valley District School Board student and it resonated with her.
“Period poverty is something that had never occurred to me before,” the 18-year-old said. “It’s a barrier that should not exist.”
Jain enlisted the help of the board’s student senate and through a social media consultation they received more than 1,000 student responses to the proposal. They also did some limited consultation with parents, the majority of whom also liked the concept.
Armed with those responses, Jain met with several trustees and found an ally in Julia Burgess who “mentored” her through the process of getting her recommendation before the board.
“Period poverty and menstrual inequity has been under discussion as a barrier to student attendance and achievement worldwide — most think it’s a Third World problem, and surely it’s much more dire there where public education for girls is not universal, let alone access to safe, hygienic menstrual products,” Burgess said. “I have to say, it was a shock to me that pads and tampons weren’t readily available in our student washrooms and change rooms. I assumed they were there, as they had been in my adolescence.”
Educators know that rather than ask for a menstrual product, students will leave school and go home.
Burgess said Jain was thorough and disciplined in her advocacy and, in the end, the board approved the recommendation but asked for more time to implement it.
“It was a recommendation without analysis and no cost so we have a lot of things we have to look at,” Pyke said. “We have to look into dispensing products. We need the right appliance and we need the right location, we don’t want one in a washroom for Grade 1 and 2s. “