Since 2024, Minnesota law has required menstrual products to be made available for free in public school bathrooms for students in grades 4 to 12. Jeanelle Rasmussen, lead nurse at St. Louis Parks Public Schools, recalled her feelings following an incident after the law went into effect: “Great. Beautiful. There’s a design on our wall [made of] pads,” she said.
The young mixed-media artist acted out of curiosity rather than malice, Rasmussen said. Still, it exposed the legislation’s limited scope. The law requires menstrual products be made available, but it “doesn’t say anything about education,” said Kara Cowell, a graduate student in public health at the University of Minnesota. As a part of her coursework, Cowell, along with classmate Mary Kenny, saw an opportunity to address the gap.
In August, Cowell and Kenny published the Minnesota Menstrual Products in Schools Toolkit. The idea is to help educators and nurses, like Rasmussen, implement the law in their schools and ensure students have opportunities to learn about menstruation in age-appropriate, culturally-appropriate ways.
To create the toolkit, available online at Women’s Foundation of Minnesota, Honest Sex Ed Minnesota and PERIOD.org, Cowell and Kenny conducted a needs survey and hosted more than 70 interviews with community partners and school staff. Over and over, Cowell explained, educators responded that what they wanted was information about how to implement the law effectively in their schools.
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Meg Bartlett-Chase, executive director of Honest Sex Ed Minnesota, assisted Kenny and Cowell in creating the toolkit, which she praises for its accessibility. “I’m sure there are elementary school teachers out there who have had someone come up to them and say, ‘Oh my god, I just had my period for the first time. What do I do?’” she said.
The toolkit also shares resources to help educators and parents navigate cultural understandings of menstruation. It notes, for example, that values around modesty may lead to limited discussion of menstruation in some cultural settings. It shares that in many Indigenous communities, “settler colonialism reframed menstruation as shameful” and links to an article about Indigenous women — including some in Minnesota — reclaiming traditional understandings and sacred practices. The toolkit also links to accompanying parent guides available in English, Somali, Hmong and Spanish.
To ensure the authenticity of the section on cultural values, Kenny and Cowell consulted with members of the communities highlighted in the toolkit. The pair also considered student gender identity. “This is something that, yes, is for girls and young women, but it’s also for gender-expansive youth, non-binary folks, transgender folks,” Kenny said. As a result, the toolkit uses the term “students who menstruate.”
Bartlett-Chase added that even for students who don’t menstruate, speaking honestly about periods and puberty is important. The traditional approach to sex ed — only talking about periods to people who menstruate or expect to someday — misses an opportunity to combat shame and misinformation.
“It forces one group of kids to have this information and in some ways — societally and socially — grow up a lot faster,” she said. “And it prevents another group of kids from understanding the complexity and nuance of human bodies and what puberty is. I don’t think that truly serves either group.”
For Rasmussen in St. Louis Park, the toolkit’s printable resources, like posters for bathrooms educating students about the menstrual products, are one of its biggest benefits. Previously, she cobbled together materials from other states, like California and Oregon.
“Now we have something for our state where we really don’t need to recreate the wheel,” she said.
Related: Breaking the taboos about menstruation
Kenny and Cowell have presented the toolkit at various events, including Education Minnesota’s MEA conference and the U.S Conference on Poverty and Basic Needs. In the spring, they aim to focus on evaluating the toolkit’s impact.
“We’re proud to center Minnesota and use it as a case example,” Kenny said. “It’s so exciting that we have this legislation.”
The post In tandem with Minnesota law, a toolkit designed by U of M students aims to demystify menstruation appeared first on MinnPost.
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