Students to lawmakers: Mandate menstrual products in school bathrooms
HARTFORD — High school students testified for a second day in favor of legislation that would require menstrual products be available in all middle and high school bathrooms across the state, including gender-neutral bathrooms.
The goal is to fight period poverty — to prevent girls and others who menstruate from missing school due to an inability to afford period products — as well as destigmatize a natural biological phenomenon that affects more than half the population.
“When young menstruators can’t afford period products and have to miss out on school, that doesn’t sit well with us,” said Amy Barratt, a senior at Greenwich High School who has been working with state Sen. Alex Bergstein, D-Greenwich, on the legislation.
“Most of the time those products are only provided in the nurse’s office,” she added. “We think this is extremely stigmatizing. You go to the nurse if you’re sick and menstruation is not that. You wouldn’t go to the nurse’s office if you needed toilet paper. That’s why it’s so important that menstrual products go into bathrooms, because it sends the message that menstruation is not an illness, it’s a natural bodily function.”
Barratt and Charlotte Hallisey, also a senior at Greenwich High School, worked with Greenwich Public Schools to get period products in all bathrooms in the local system, but didn’t want to stop there. They are now part of a statewide coalition of students working to end “period poverty” in the state, many of whom have testified in front of legislative committees at the state Capitol this week in favor of the bill.
State Sen. Saud Anwar, D-South Windsor, a vicechair of the Public Health Committee and the Committee on Children, heard testimony from the girls and said he is shocked this is a conversation being had in 2020.
“This is a physiologic need,” said Anwar, a medical doctor. “We have to wake up and it’s about time. It amazes me that we are having this conversation in 2020 and that people are looking at this from the perspective of dollars and cents. When people are going to be speaking about the cost issue, it would be good to understand they are putting a dollar value to a physiologic need, a human need. By doing that you’re saying some people are more important than others, and that should be unacceptable to us as a society.”
Bergstein said initial cost estimates for the first year would be about $400,000, which includes the installation of dispensers in bathrooms that don’t already have them. After that, it is estimated the annual cost would be roughly $250,000 for supplies. She said the student group has applied to the Partnership for Connecticut, a public-private partnership created with the Dalio Foundation to help disengaged middle and high school students stay in school.
“This seems to be aligned with their mission to keep students engaged in school in Connecticut,” Bergstein said. “It is actually a low cost, high impact solution to keeping young people in school.”
Some cities like New York and Boston have already begun offering free menstrual products in school bathrooms. Illinois and California has passed legislation to make feminine hygiene products available in schools with high numbers of low-income students, and New Hampshire passed a bill in 2019 requiring public schools to provide free feminine products. In 2016, Connecticut passed legislation to add a tax exemption for feminine hygiene products that went into effect in 2018.
A 2019 study conducted by Harris Insights & Analytics found 20 percent of girls aged 13 to 19 reported being unable to afford to purchase menstrual hygiene products, and the same percentage reported they have either left school early or missed school entirely because they did not have access to period products.
Mariam Khan, a Hamden High School senior and lead organizer of the Connecticut chapter of PERIOD, a national advocacy group pushing menstrual equity, said she worked to get rid of a 25 cent fee on the products in Hamden schools, and has taken on other initiatives to help make period products available in schools, but pleaded with legislators to take that burden off her hands.
“This is not something we should have to fight for, we should not have to fight for a right,” Khan said “It’s the job of you all as public servants to take this on ... women should not ever have to decide between food or supplies. No student should have to decide between school or periods and no menstruator should have to decide between their body or humanity.”