NEW YORK – Students at High School for Arts and Business in Corona, Queens are receiving free tampons as part of a pilot project to fight the “stigma” of menstruation.

New York City Councilwoman Julissa Ferreras wants all schools, public buildings, homeless shelters, and prisons to supply personal hygiene products for women at taxpayer expense, because some women can’t afford tampons and others are embarrassed about their periods, Al Jazeera reports.

Ferreras thinks that buying tampons and pads for women will help alleviate a heavy financial burden for some parents and help to destigmatize the menstrual cycle. High School for the Arts and Business installed a dispenser in the female restroom to get Ferreras initiative rolling, while the councilwomen works to draft legislation to force all schools and public institutions to give away tampons.

MORE NEWS: Know These Before Moving From Cyprus To The UK

“We should be eliminating all worries and obstacles from young girls who are going to public school in New York City,” said Ferraras, who said some girls skip class to avoid the embarrassment of their period.

Ferraras said she doesn’t think girls should have to carry their purse into the restroom during their special time of the month because it’s a shameful signal to other students.

Aside from giving out tampons, Ferraras also believes schools should spend more time talking about all things menstruation.

“We can’t talk about girls’ anatomy without firs talking about a young woman’s cycle,” Ferraras said, according to the news site. “That’s really something that’s classed over. We need to spend more time on the topic.”

Student proficiency rates show schools should also spend more time on math and English, as well.

Eighth-grade English results from last school year, for example, show only 32.9 percent of students are proficient, while only a mere 22.5 percent of students reached that threshold for English, according to the New York City Department of Education.

MORE NEWS: How to prepare for face-to-face classes

Ferraras believes limited access to tampons is partially to blame for the dismal academic performance.

“Some young girls have said, ‘I know my mother is struggling to pay the bills, I don’t feel comfortable asking her for pads also,” Ferraras told New York Magazine. “So some of them would just rather stay home or find themselves using one pad for the whole day.”

The councilwoman noted that pads and tampons are already free and available from school nurse’s offices, but students must request them, which is too much of a hassle, she said.

“If we were able to remove the taboo from condoms, and New York City gives out condoms for free, then we should be able to do this,” she said. “Just like the schools order toilet paper, they should be ordering these supplies.”

Ferraras is working with tampon advocates Jennifer Weiss-Wolf, vice president of development at NYU School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice, as well as Free the Tampons found Nancy Kramer to secure a tampon machine from manufacturer Hospeco for the pilot project.

“I thought it could be a big deal for the city to take this on as a policy agenda, both in terms of immediate impact and in terms of collecting data to show that this is a problem,” Weiss-Wolf told New York Magazine. “I think that’s sort of the hang-up for this country — there really isn’t empirical data to show how often girls might miss school or what the adverse psychological effects could be, whereas that information is gathered in the developing world.”

Ferraras assembled a roundtable in June to help promote her idea and draft legislation that will force public prisons, schools, and other departments to supply free tampons. The group includes representatives from Planned Parenthood, the Women’s Prison Association, Care for the Homeless, the Food Bank for New York, the YMCA and others.

But not everyone thinks it’s a good idea.

“When we got some attention for this, we had a couple of hate emails like, ‘Well, why don’t you just by them cars? Why don’t you just buy them jewelry?’ This is not a luxary,” Ferraras told the magazine. “You can focus on your everyday life, and not whether your period has gone through your clothes yet. I want my young women and my women in general to be able to sit in any room next to a man and be able to focus on and think about the same things. That’s it.”

It’s a matter of equality, Kramer said.

“Men walk into their restroom and they have everything in it that they need to take care of their normal bodily functions – women don’t,” she said. “I honestly believe that if men got periods we wouldn’t be having this discussion.”