I’m autistic too and was sent away to many places growing up.

I wasn’t a bad kid. I was a curious kid with absent parents, thus I had to be the problem.

I grew up in New York and they have quite the insidious little “cottage” industry there too. Even judges admitted to taking bribes to needlessly send children away years after the fact.

I learned early on the importance of reading a room. It was my best survival skill back then. This meant I knew to keep my mouth shut, be polite and never do anything that isn’t told to me. I learned to just follow instructions and I made it through many years completely unscathed. No one ever put their hands on me, not even once and I was generally a staff favorite. Staff brought me books and cassette tapes and spent time educating me on what they had given me. One man taught me about Led Zeppelin, another, Walt Whitman but this wasn’t the case for the other kids. Not even close. Had I made a dollar for every kid a saw body slammed and pinned down by 4 grown adults, many like the men you describe, while they scream and howl, I could have bought us all a lawyer to get us out of there.

My “education” was like yours. I was the most intelligent out of all the group so naturally, I was the one who was going to slip through the cracks. Most courses were completed by handing me a cliffs note book and a 20 year old textbook and the rest was up to me. It was rote memorization and only that. Nothing absorbed, nothing actually learned. I flew through state administered regents exams like a pro but then struggled when I was back in regular school because it turns out you actually have to go to class, pay attention, engage and do the work in a real classroom and I was never taught that. I was always told I was the smartest in the room but I wasn’t.

I’m so sorry you had to go through this.