I was in elementary in Canada early 90’s. My school was weird. There’s a large Mennonite community in the area where I grew up so a large percentage (more than 50%) of the kids in this school were Mennonite. For those unfamiliar, these are similar to Amish. Such farmers with strong religious views, most of them were “old order” meaning they grew up in homes with little to no electricity. They also finish school at age 12 regardless of progress. This meant that they were exempt from a lot of the classes my tiny public school had to offer. No French, computing, or Sex Ed. A lot of them were also in special Ed. I’m not going to sugar coat this. It’s forbidden from them to marry outside of their culture and only like 4 families came to the area. So there’s a lot of disabilities as a result of inbreeding with that community.

All this to say that my school had absolutely no clue how to deal with my undiagnosed autism. But they seemed to have decent funding due to the much higher needs.

I was in special Ed via French exemption status. This means I never learned french. I’d instead be placed in a room with all the Mennonite kids often in a corner trying to read. Eventually I was put into some kind of program. A neurologist should come by and do experiments on me. Nothing weird, just testing my fine motor skills. They (falsely) diagnosed me with “elementary tremors” a pediatric doctor upped this to a “retardation caused by mild down syndrome” (extremely wrong) after years of that nonsense they decided to use this crazy new fangled technology to give me a leg up with writing. I was given a Macintosh computer. I had a desk with tiny wheels and my 4th grade self had to wheel this from class to class (including “portables”). Of course this was pretty obsolete tech even for its time. My parents got me an Alpha Smart which was way better. By 6th grade I had a personal support worker to help get me caught up. I failed grades 3-6 but was ‘placed’ into the next grade anyway and never made to repeat anything.

Highschool was very different, no Mennonite, so way less funding. It was still a French exemption class but there were only about 5 other students in the class. It seemed to be less about education, or assessment of my condition. It was some watching videos and doing some analysis. It was mostly just a time to catch up on homework. Often there wasn’t even a teacher present.