LINCOLN — For a young middle schooler, a major challenge one day was a history test she had stayed up late studying for, confident she was “going to crush it.”
But as her teacher was passing out the test, the girl felt a “telltale wetness in her underwear”: Her menstrual period had begun.
She knew she couldn’t pull out a crinkly pad in the “dead quiet classroom” or sit bleeding. She could pull her sweatshirt down to cover her pants and walk stiffly to the front of the room to ask to use the restroom. Once there, she could either hope a friend could help or try to go to the nurse.
“But by that time, she’s going to have to go home because her pants are ruined, so goodbye history test,” Lincoln East High School senior Cassidy Bell told the Education Committee on Monday.
“That girl was me, and that girl was just about every woman in this room,” Cassidy continued. “That girl is a lot of girls in Nebraska right now.”
‘Our dignity and our humanity’
In part because of Cassidy’s advocacy, menstrual products are available in all of Lincoln Public Schools’ middle and high schools, after such a program began earlier at Lincoln East.
State Sen. Danielle Conrad of Lincoln introduced Legislative Bill 1050 to require school districts to provide menstrual products in girls’ bathrooms or locker rooms by the 2025-26 school year.
The bill does not include an appropriation, but the Nebraska Department of Education, which would be required to supply products, estimates an annual cost of $750,000 for the approximately 84,000 female students in grades 6-12 in public schools. An extra $123,000 would go toward operating expenses and hiring an additional staff member.
The Legislature has previously removed a sales tax on menstrual supplies and provided period products to incarcerated women and girls, which Conrad described as first steps.
“It goes of course to our dignity and our humanity,” Conrad told the Education Committee.
‘Insurmountable task’
Alyssa Capek, an eighth grader at Crete Middle School, said it can be “traumatic and embarrassing” for girls when their period starts and they’re 11 years old with no products.
At Crete, Alyssa added, students are not allowed to carry backpacks between classes, and students don’t want to risk getting in trouble for stopping at their locker on a bathroom pass.
Archita Raj of Elkhorn South High School said regardless of income, female students struggle with this issue, and “all understand the feeling of panic when we forget a tampon and how distracting that can be to our learning.”
Cassidy described talking with a woman who had been in the first graduating class of Lincoln East, which opened in 1967, and feeling frustrated as the woman said she tried a similar project decades ago.
Equity, Cassidy testified, requires acknowledging that some barriers are created by one’s body and “treating girls’ bodies as female, menses and all.”
“Once female students hit puberty, we’re given this insurmountable task of being our own nurses and our own janitors,” Cassidy said. “And because we don’t talk about it, we girls never say to each other, ‘Maybe it doesn’t have to be like this.’”
The Nebraska State Education Association, Nebraska Association of School Boards, ACLU of Nebraska and Lincoln and Grand Island Public Schools representatives also testified in support.
No one testified in opposition. The committee took no immediate action.