A law requiring Virginia schools to stock menstrual products for student use will go unfunded for another year.
A budget amendment from Del. Holly Seibold, D-Fairfax, proposed giving annual grants to school divisions in order to purchase menstrual products.
That $250,000 annual funding — which would have come out to about $1,900 per school division — did not make it into budget negotiations this General Assembly session.
Seibold plans to try again next year, an aide said. Such grants could be significant to help school divisions comply with a state law at a time when many localities are looking for ways to trim expenses.
School menstrual product mandates in other states
According to monitoring by the nonprofit Alliance for Period Supplies, nine states including Maryland fund and require schools to provide period products, while 10 states and the District of Columbia require period products to be available but don’t provide funding. Virginia is in that group.
In six states, including North Carolina, state grants are available to help schools provide period products, but it’s not a requirement.
Kentucky, West Virginia and Tennessee are among the 25 states that have no requirement or funding to provide menstrual products in schools.
Virginia’s law specifies that each school board shall make the supplies available, but doesn’t specify any other details about monitoring compliance.
Maryland’s law puts compliance monitoring on the county school board, as does that in Vermont. In New Jersey, which provides funding for the mandate, and Utah, which does not, that duty falls on the state education board.
The mandates typically don’t specify consequences for not adhering to them.
The 2020 law requires local school boards to ensure that students have access to free menstrual products at school. In middle and high schools, that means tampons and pads must be available in bathrooms, while elementary schools can make supplies available wherever it “deems appropriate,” such as a nurse’s office.
“If I tell someone it’s a law, people have gotten really surprised,” said Maya Manchester. The senior at Thomas A. Edison High School in Alexandria founded a nonprofit, Period101, to create menstrual supply kits. Period101 has two student-led Northern Virginia chapters and another in Washington, D.C., to provide menstrual products to students through school food pantries.
“Schools don’t always know or aren’t actively enforcing it, even though they have the ability to,” Manchester said of the mandate. “So it’s important to have students in schools who are willing to tell their administration to get products in the bathrooms.”
At her own school, Manchester said there are about 2,000 students and a lot of bathrooms, which can make it hard to make sure they’re always fully stocked.
The school menstrual supplies law took effect in summer 2020, during the height of pandemic closures. Compliance wasn’t a priority in those peak days of COVID restrictions, Sen. Jennifer Boysko, D-Fairfax, the chief patron of the bill in the Virginia Senate, said in a December interview.
Just because the law requires schools to provide free menstrual products doesn’t mean they’re actually available, students from the Gender and Sexuality Alliance at E.C. Glass High School in Lynchburg said late last year. The club planned to use $600 from a grant to pay for dispensers and menstrual products for the bathrooms at Glass, but the school board ultimately rejected the funding because it came from an LGBTQ+ advocacy group.
Since the students called out the lack of period products, the division has installed dispensers in restrooms throughout secondary school buildings, said Austin Journey, spokesperson for Lynchburg City Schools. Journey said the 30 dispensers across the division’s three middle schools and two high schools are being restocked “just like other restroom supplies.”
He said the division budgets about $4,000 annually for supplies and replacement dispensers.
The school system gets help from the Period Access Distribution Center, run by the Junior League of Lynchburg, which provides kits of period supplies students can pick up from nurses’ offices. The volunteer organization acknowledges that the recurring cost of buying menstrual supplies can be a burden for people in tight financial situations.
“A lot of times when people conceptualize poverty, they think about housing, they think about food, they think about utilities. But a lot of times they don’t think about something like period poverty,” said Junior League of Lynchburg president Michelline Hall.
Period supplies can cost between $6 and $16 for a one-month supply in the U.S., according to a 2023 analysis by virtual health care provider PlushCare.
Without the proper supplies, having a period can keep people out of work or school.
The PAD Center also offers a monthly subscription service for people in the region who need menstrual supplies, which is so popular it’s currently capped at 200 subscribers, said Samantha Citty, who chairs the PAD Center committee.
Period101 invites students to apply to start a chapter at their own school, but Manchester said limited financial means may prevent some interested students from doing so.
“I talked to a student over the summer who is based in the Virginia Beach area, and she said she was interested in starting a chapter but didn’t know if she’d be able to execute it well,” Manchester said. “She didn’t know if people at her school would be able to donate to school-wide drives.”
Manchester said she’d like for Period101 to grow to the point where chapters can collect donations to be sent on to other schools that need it.
