It was only 10:30 a.m., and Emma had already bled through her pad while at school. “I literally hate my life so much,” she texted her mom. “There is somehow blood on my seat and I Don’t know how to clean it up without anyone seeing im gonna cry.” Adding to Emma’s panic was the fact that she didn’t have any extra pads nearby, since students at her suburban Tennessee middle school aren’t allowed to bring backpacks in the classroom. The 13-year-old asked to go to the bathroom, but the school doesn’t provide menstrual products there and she had none in her locker, either. She didn’t want to let her male teacher know about the situation, so she paced the hallway on the verge of tears while a boy lingered nearby. Then she remembered that a friend kept a stash in her locker, which she left open. Otherwise, “I would have been screwed,” Emma says. “I feel like I’m in the frickin’ wild.”
As gun violence surges in schools, some administrators have turned to backpack bans as a solution. In a letter announcing the policy last year, the superintendent of one Michigan district said, “backpacks make it easier for students to hide weapons, which can be disassembled and harder to identify or hidden in pockets, inside books or under other items.” After school shootings in Uvalde, Texas, and Parkland, Florida, several campuses mandated clear bags instead. While the vast majority of U.S. schools don’t have these restrictions, the number that do is growing, even though security experts say they haven’t been proven to prevent school shootings. Perhaps due to this lack of evidence, several students (some of whose names have been changed or last names withheld) told me that administrators cited other reasons, including crowded hallways, vapes and drug use, or even back pain to justify the mandates.
These backpack bans have made the already difficult experience of navigating one’s period as a teen even more difficult. Menstruating students have nowhere to discreetly keep their hygiene products and instead are left scrambling for covert ways to carry pads and tampons at a time when their bodily changes already weigh on them like shameful secrets. “I want to feel safe when I’m on my period,” Emma says. “It’s made me literally want to go home-schooled, because I just can’t deal with it.”
This school year, Kristi Roe-Owen was outraged to discover that her 13-year-old could no longer bring a backpack to class in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Any benefit to a ban “is not a worthwhile trade-off for our daughters’ health and well-being,” she recently wrote on her blog. “It’s just another lazy policy that inadvertently treats women as second-class citizens.” Some schools have tried to address the problem by telling students they can get menstrual products from a teacher, a nurse’s office, or, in some cases, the bathroom. But Roe-Owen’s daughter, Elle, didn’t find any of those to be viable solutions when she started bleeding in class a few months ago. Asking a staffer for a pad “would most likely put a lot of eyes on me,” Elle says. “That was a very scary thought.” She especially didn’t want boys to overhear such personal information and potentially “ask me questions or put me down.” She wrapped a sweater around her waist and didn’t put on a pad until she came home from school.
Roe-Owen has given her daughter cloth pouches that can be tied like a belt and encouraged her to wear cargo pants, but Elle regularly forgets to fill her pockets with supplies. Instead, she describes her period survival strategy as “one pad and my dreams” — meaning that whatever she puts on in the morning has to last the whole day — which makes her mom worry about infection.
Most of the teens I spoke with were horrified by the idea of talking about their periods with an adult at school. One 14-year-old told me that she bled throughout a track meet because she wasn’t allowed to have her backpack nearby and was too intimidated to ask her “old and grouchy” female teacher for a tampon (thankfully, she says, the uniform was red). Others told me they dreaded broaching the subject with male teachers. A few years ago, Emerson had just come back from the bathroom when she started to bleed. The then-eighth-grader from a Washington, D.C., suburb told her teacher she had an “emergency” and asked to be excused again. He wanted details. The class was quietly working on a test, so she whispered, “I got my period.” “He was like ‘Oh! Go, go, go, go, go!” she says. “It was a very awkward situation” — one that would have been even worse if she hadn’t stashed a tampon in her pocket ahead of time.
To avoid these embarrassing interactions, students and their parents have come up with creative ways of concealing period products during that time of the month. On a Facebook page where one mother raised the issue of backpack bans, more than 200 comments offer suggestions from period underwear and menstrual cups to pouches that can be hidden in a bra or attached to a leg. A few people mentioned zippered scrunchies that could hold small tampons or scrunched-up pads inside.
Maysa, a 13-year-old in Portland, Oregon, thinks the scrunchie is a good idea for students who are “really embarrassed” about their periods. Since a backpack ban was introduced at her school earlier this year, one of her friends has tucked a “super tiny” tampon in her bun, while others shove products in their high-top sneakers. She personally doesn’t feel ashamed about carrying a pencil case full of tampons to the bathroom, but there are logistical issues. The pouch doesn’t fit what she needs to accommodate her “heavier flow,” and though Oregon requires that public schools provide free menstrual products, Maysa finds the tampons cheap and the pads too thick. When she ran out of supplies a few days ago, she opted to bleed through a pair of new jeans rather than use what was on offer in the bathroom. “It makes me angry,” she says. “That’s the best they can get?”
Other teens say the machines that are supposed to dole out menstrual supplies tend to be empty, forcing them to stop by their lockers en route to the bathroom and shove tampons into their waistbands or up their sleeves. Mckenzie, a schoolmate of Maysa’s, tells me a male security guard once stared at her as she took a pad from her locker. “I was trying to be discreet,” she says, “not looking like I’m trying to grab drugs out of my backpack.”
Then there’s the time it takes to change out a pad or tampon on the sly. Emma says she and other students are penalized for being in the hallway more than five minutes between classes, but that’s barely long enough to grab anything from her locker — which can sometimes be in a different building than her next class — and go to the bathroom. On top of that, Emma says it can be embarrassing to stroll into a stall with a pad in hand, since even younger girls who haven’t yet started menstruating make period jokes. “They low-key scare me,” she says. “I want to punch them in the face and tell them that they’re not as cool as they think they are.”
The situation is also frustrating for staffers. Katarina, who teaches English at Maysa and Mckenzie’s school, says a student recently came to class early and, in a whisper, asked if she could leave a tote bag with period supplies behind the teacher’s desk. Katarina gave her a pencil case so that she wouldn’t be stopped in the hallway by a security guard. While Katarina has always kept a table stocked with higher-quality menstrual supplies beside her classroom door, the backpack ban is now forcing her to brainstorm new fixes. She and a colleague recently asked a male administrator whether they could fill an empty locker with products, but were rebuffed because it could be used to store contraband. While Katarina says the rule has made the kids less distracted, she also feels the unfortunate side effects could have been avoided if female staff and students had been consulted. “It’s also a man who created this policy,” she says, “so I don’t think he really understands the discomfort.”
Roe-Owen has called her daughter’s school a few times to voice her concerns over the backpack ban. She wants a parent-student association to address the problem, but to Elle’s mind, a simple solution is staring them all in the face. “They just need to repeal” the mandate, she says. “It’s an absolutely horrible policy. It just makes life worse in school.” Emma agrees. She’s already looking forward to the end of eighth grade and the promise of wearing whatever color clothing she wants in high school, knowing that all her period-related needs will be right beside her in her backpack. Recently, she wore a white athletic skirt to class and spent all day asking friends whether she had bled through it. “That would have killed me,” she says. “I could never go back.”
