Blake Fabre

Period 1
2-7-19

Feminine Products Should Be Offered at Schools

Every single person here should know a female, whether that be girlfriend, mom, sister,
aunt, cousin or platonic friend. And seeing that we are juniors, I am able to confidently say that
all, if not most of us have gone through a Health class of some sort. I don't mean to be in bad
taste, but knowing this we should all be somewhat familiar with something called a period. And
they require a certain type of maintenance, which can be pretty costly. And not all California
schools are making an effort to help.

Now, I’m not saying that this a national issue. In fact, the largest school district in the
country led by the New York Department of Education, offers free feminine products to students.
Although this law was passed in 2018, it still made a difference for students in New York this
year. California hasn’t completely ignored this issue however. In 2018 the passed a law stating,
that only some public schools must offer free feminine products if they have a student population
between sixth and twelfth graders, of which at least 40 percent come from low-income families.
We need to push this a step further, allowing every school to offer free feminine products.

When creating the Assembly Bill No. 10, approved by our governor they discussed this
issue. In the bill’s Chapter 687, Section 35292.6, Sub-section 1, it states that “A public school
maintaining any combination of classes from grade six to grade twelve, ... that meets the 40-
percent pupil poverty threshold required to operate a schoolwide program… to stock at least 50
percent of the school’s restrooms with feminine hygiene products at all times.” Doing research
on our school we have around a 28% poverty rate that doesn’t qualify us.

Everyone should know from the issues of the strike, that our district has an apparent
finance crisis. For this school year, LAUSD’s total budget was $13.7 billion. Some may say the
installation and maintenance of the machines would be too costly for our LAUSD to afford. If
you look at the totals from Webster High School in New York you’d learn, “Webster purchased
24 feminine hygiene product dispensers totaling about $8,800.” (Finnerty 9). With the total of 8
female restrooms all over campus, I’ve calculated our total should be somewhere around $3,000.
Although, when you look at the districts summary, which is freely available online, they are
already in debt, but what’s just a few more thousand to help millions of girls throughout the
district.
 Girls I’m sure you understand, but boys, think about it. With future girlfriends and future
wives you will be fully exposed to the cost of feminine hygiene. And just imagine your future
daughters, you will at some point be confronted with putting up some money on the grocery bill.
Yearly, to support ourselves we spend over $3,000 for something we can’t control. But, if they’d
offer free feminine products at school for children in grades 6-12 that would decrease your
annual bill immensely. We need these monthly treatments. We want to be supported even as
teeangers at school. Women want what we need. And we need to have a solution for our
impending threat that arrives once a month.