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In the nine years since New York City passed a groundbreaking law requiring public schools to provide free menstrual products in bathrooms, the Education Department has consistently “failed to deliver” on its legal obligation, a lawsuit filed last week in Manhattan alleges.
The 2016 legislation was the first in the country to require middle and high schools to provide free tampons and sanitary pads in bathrooms.
But in the ensuing years, city Education Department officials violated that law “at every turn,” failing to adequately communicate the new legal obligation to schools or ensure they were complying, according to the suit filed on behalf of the nonprofit Period Law and an unnamed teenage student. As a result, students across the city still routinely miss class time because they don’t have access to menstrual products — and when they are available, students often don’t know about them or don’t want to use them because they’re so low-quality, the suit said.
“The Department [of Education]’s failure to protect the needs of its menstruating students — despite a near-decade-long legal mandate — is both unlawful and willful,” according to the lawsuit, which was filed by the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell in Manhattan Supreme Court.
Last November, after City Council intervention and threats of legal action, the city Education Department published long-awaited compliance data. But the city’s report “falsely claimed that the Department had achieved 100% compliance,” the suit claims.
The suit asked the judge to order the Education Department to set aside a designated budget to comply with the law, hire an independent adviser to monitor its progress, and re-do its data reporting on school-by-school compliance.
Neither the city Education nor Law Department replied to a request for comment on the lawsuit.
At a 2023 City Council hearing, Education Department school facilities chief John Shea called reports of unstocked dispensers “unacceptable” and said schools should escalate complaints to his office. The Education Department has provided a “Know Your Period” student guide to every school, which walks students through how to respond to their periods, according to the city’s data.
NYC’s menstrual equity law breaks new ground
A 2019 national survey found the majority of girls across the country didn’t have access to free menstrual products in their high schools and missed school more frequently as a result.
Many girls don’t know when their periods will start and don’t bring supplies from home, and the cost of menstrual products can put them out of reach for others — a particularly acute problem in a system where more than 70% of students live in poverty. Estimates of the average cost of a month’s supply of menstrual products range from about $9 to $15.
The city’s 2016 law “was intended to put menstrual products on par with bathroom products needed by all students regardless of sex, such as toilet paper and soap,” according to the suit.
But from the outset, implementation was spotty, advocates and lawyers said.
The Education Department’s only communication with schools about the law in 2016 was a short blurb in the weekly Principal’s Digest that failed to mention the legal requirement, according to a public records request filed by Period Law.
Department officials largely placed responsibility for complying with the law in the hands of custodian engineers, who were supposed to receive the menstrual products and dispensers and replenish them when they ran low, according to the suit.
But officials did little to ensure schools were complying, and it often fell to students to ask for refills, according to the suit. Efforts to spread the word about the initiative through flyers were woefully insufficient, the suit added.
In the meantime, several enterprising student groups took oversight into their own hands. A Brooklyn Girl Scout troop visited schools in 2018 and found fewer than 1 in 5 had adequate supplies and disposal bins. An award-winning Bronx middle school podcast reported that students still had to visit the office and use a code word to get pads.
NYC Council steps up the pressure
Long-simmering complaints about the city’s lack of compliance came to the fore during a 2023 City Council hearing. Multiple lawmakers said they’d personally visited multiple schools and found no menstrual products in the bathrooms. Period Law revealed that in a recent survey of city high school students, 85% said they still lacked access to menstrual products at school.
Students said that contributed to an ongoing sense of stigma and shame about periods.
“My school didn’t provide menstrual products, and my classroom didn’t make it a comfortable place to discuss what any of us were experiencing,” said Gabriela Lopez Castillo, a recent college graduate and youth advocate for the group PERIOD, who testified at the 2023 hearing.
The suit also cites 18 examples from 2024 and 2025 of New York City educators creating crowdfunding campaigns to buy menstrual products for students who otherwise wouldn’t have access to them at school.
In December 2023, the council passed a package of new bills meant to shore up the law, expanding the mandate to cover elementary schools, and requiring the Education Department to publicly report on compliance by July 5, 2024. The Education Department blew past that deadline and only published the data in November after Period Law threatened legal action, according to the suit.
The city’s data said 100% of schools complied with the law for the 2023-2024 school year — a contention lawyers say is “obviously and demonstrably false” given the extensive testimony about lack of access to menstrual products in the September 2023 council hearing.
The suit suggests a number of possible remedies, including forcing the Education Department to work with Period Law to improve its data collection and creating a working group of advocates and officials to oversee compliance.
Michael Elsen-Rooney is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Michael at melsen-rooney@chalkbeat.org.
