Robin is fourteen years old. He is officially enrolled at a Vancouver high school. The district receives Category G autism designation funding for him. The province is paying for his education.
He has not walked through the school doors once this year.
He sits in his room, not voluntarily leaving for the past 10 months.
The emails arrive periodically. “We hope he can return soon.” The tone is polite, neutral, professionally concerned. On paper, he is a supported student. In reality, he is functionally absent — not expelled, not withdrawn, simply suspended in administrative limbo.
The money moves. The child does not.
Robin is not a metaphor. He is what happens when early support succeeds, school support erodes, burnout sets in, and policy changes arrive at precisely the wrong moment. His life traces the fault lines between ministries, between prevention and crisis response, between equity rhetoric and fiscal design.
To understand what the restructuring of disability funding means for children like him, we have to begin earlier — before the room, before the collapse — when the system was still working.
Early intervention and the promise of return
Robin was diagnosed as autistic in Grade 1. Before that, there had already been a year of weekly therapy through Child and Youth Mental Health. After diagnosis, he continued with counselling and began weekly occupational therapy funded through autism funding.
For a while, he did well.
He learned regulation strategies. We learned to accept his needs and encourage him to follow interests. His parent learned how to co-regulate, how to scaffold transitions, how to prevent escalation before it spiralled. School was bad— it rarely delivered IEP promises — but he still liked going. The private supports filled gaps the classroom could not.
Governments often cite the economic case for early intervention. Investment now, savings later. Longitudinal studies across North America, Europe and Australia consistently show that early developmental supports correlate with improved educational attainment, reduced long-term mental health costs, and decreased reliance on adult disability income support. Policy analysts speak in ratios: four dollars returned for every dollar spent; sometimes more.
The underlying logic is simple. A child who learns emotional regulation at six is less likely to require psychiatric crisis services at sixteen. A teenager who graduates is more likely to participate in the labour market at twenty-five. Prevention is cheaper than remediation.
Robin is the child those models are built around. Early support worked.
But economic models assume continuity. They assume that once a child is stabilised, the environment they enter will not quietly withdraw the supports that made stabilisation possible.
That assumption is fragile.
The erosion phase
There were so many meltdowns and crises over the years.
A flow erosion of his sense of connection to the school.
IEP accommodations were often not implemented. Support hours fluctuated. Educational assistants were stretched thin. Resource teachers triaged among multiple designated students. Robin was bright. He could mask. He was not the loudest crisis in the room.
Over time, the gap between what was written in his plan and what was delivered widened. Each small discrepancy added stress. Each unmanaged demand required more internal effort. The private occupational therapy continued to reinforce skills, but the daily school environment increasingly contradicted them.
Stress, for autistic children, is cumulative. It does not always announce itself as misbehaviour. Often it presents as compliance — until compliance becomes unsustainable.
In 7th grade, the district eventually encouraged a school transfer. A fresh start. A new environment.
For a child already operating at the edge of capacity, novelty is not neutral. New building. New staff. New social codes. New expectations. For a child with a PDA profile — whose nervous system reads perceived demands as threat — change multiplies load.
The final incident was bureaucratically small. He attended for testing. He was not properly supported. When he attempted to take his test sheet with him, staff pursued him, concerned about academic integrity.
To administrators, this was policy enforcement.
To a dysregulated autistic child, it was pursuit.
Nervous systems do not parse intent. They respond to threat.
Burnout is not refusal
Autistic burnout is increasingly documented in academic literature and autistic-led research. It is characterised by profound exhaustion, loss of previously acquired skills, increased sensory sensitivity, and sharply reduced tolerance for demands. It is not depression, though depression may follow. It is not oppositional behaviour. It is depletion.
Burnout often follows prolonged masking — the effort to appear neurotypical in environments that do not accommodate difference. It follows chronic environmental mismatch. It follows years of absorbing demands that exceed capacity.
In burnout, executive functioning narrows. Tasks that were once manageable become impossible. Leaving a room can feel insurmountable. The body retreats in order to survive.
Policy frameworks struggle with this because burnout is episodic. A child may function for years and then collapse. Severity categories assume static impairment. Burnout is dynamic. Revealing the struggles he was feeling inside as he tried desperately to hang on to a sense of belonging, but wasn’t able to perform the version of him that the school insisted upon.
The economics of exclusion
When Robin stopped attending, the province did not stop paying. The high school continues to receive Category G funding attached to his designation, as far as I know, like he’ll magically show up there tomorrow. The allocation is based on diagnosis, not attendance. There is no requirement that funds be itemised per student. They enter a pooled budget serving many children.
On paper, he is funded.
In practice, he is not being educated.
This distinction matters economically. School exclusion is not cost-neutral. Research consistently links chronic non-attendance with poorer mental health outcomes, reduced educational attainment, and diminished long-term earnings. Among autistic youth, school trauma correlates with increased rates of anxiety disorders, depression, and suicidality.
When a child exits school due to burnout, the cost does not disappear. It migrates.
Educational expenditure becomes mental health expenditure. School-based supports become crisis-based interventions. Preventive spending becomes remedial spending.
The restructuring of disability funding arrives in this context. The previous autism funding, modest as it was, allowed families to purchase stabilising supports — occupational therapy, counselling, tutoring — that compensated for school gaps. The new model introduces severity thresholds and income testing. Some children will qualify automatically. Others will receive a smaller, unrestricted supplement.
From a Treasury perspective, targeting funds toward the most severe cases appears efficient. But efficiency measured over a single fiscal year can produce inefficiency over a lifetime.
False savings are those that shrink one ministry’s budget while expanding another’s.
Caregiver burnout and the invisible subsidy
There is another economic layer rarely acknowledged in budget speeches: parental labour.
When Robin withdrew from school, the caregiving load intensified. His parent became everything for him. This labour is unpaid. It is also economically significant.
Research on families of disabled children shows higher rates of workforce exit, reduced hours, lower lifetime earnings, and increased health complications among primary caregivers. When a parent reduces paid employment to stabilise a child, the province loses tax revenue while increasing long-term support risk.
The new Disability Supplement’s flexibility — allowing funds to be used for housekeeping or food delivery — recognises something the previous autism funding did not: that supporting the caregiver can stabilise the household. This is not trivial. It is a meaningful design shift.
But flexibility without sufficient scale does not offset the loss of therapeutic scaffolding. A cleaner can reduce household stress. It cannot replace occupational therapy aimed at rebuilding tolerance after burnout.
The economic question is not whether some flexibility is beneficial. It is whether the overall structure reduces collapse or merely redistributes strain.
Administrative burden and the politics of exhaustion
As eligibility systems grow more complex, families face increasing administrative burden. Scholars of public administration have documented how learning costs, compliance costs and psychological costs deter participation — especially among those already overwhelmed.
Needs-based reviews, severity reassessments, income verification, documentation updates: each requirement may be individually reasonable. Collectively, they can become insurmountable.
Burnout families are, by definition, depleted. Requiring them to repeatedly demonstrate impairment — particularly when the impairment includes difficulty tolerating demands — creates a structural paradox. The children most unable to comply with complex processes are those most at risk of losing support.
PDA profiles intensify this tension. Standardised assessments are inherently demand-heavy. Sit here. Answer this. Complete that. Engage with this unfamiliar adult. For a child whose disability includes extreme demand sensitivity, the assessment itself can distort presentation. Refusal or shutdown may be misinterpreted as non-cooperation rather than evidence of need.
The inability to perform disability on cue becomes evidence of lesser disability.
Policy does not intend this outcome. But design interacts with neurobiology whether it intends to or not.
Severity hierarchies and moral thresholds
The introduction of automatic eligibility for certain types of autism formalises a hierarchy that has long operated informally.
In schools, distinctions between “high-functioning” and “severe” have shaped access to educational assistants, resource time and accommodation. Codifying severity categories makes that hierarchy explicit in another Ministry that previously offered support to all diagnosed autistic kids whose families had cleared the hurdle of many applications and processes and could clear the hurdle of the complicated process for obtaining approvals and reimbursements and scheduling appointments.
The ethical risk is not in acknowledging different support needs. It is in creating a threshold that recognises only the most visible forms of impairment while minimising others.
Robin does not have an intellectual disability. He is cognitively intact. He can speak articulately when regulated. From the outside, he may not appear profoundly disabled.
Yet he cannot leave his room.
Severity models often measure impairment in terms of intellectual functioning and adaptive skills across stable environments. They struggle to capture episodic incapacity triggered by environmental mismatch.
When policy recognises disability only at the point of catastrophe — when functioning is visibly and consistently low — it implicitly rewards collapse over prevention.
Diagnostic incentives and disappearing documentation
Under the previous funding model, a formal autism diagnosis unlocked predictable support. The incentive to pursue comprehensive assessment was clear. Families often paid thousands of dollars for private evaluations when public waitlists were years long, believing that documentation would translate into service.
If diagnosis no longer significantly increases funding for many families, the incentive structure shifts. Some may pursue only the federal Disability Tax Credit certification, which focuses on functional impairment rather than diagnostic specificity. They may forgo costly autism and psychoeducational assessments altogether.
The child does not disappear. The paperwork might.
School funding formulas tied to designation rely on documented diagnoses. A reduction in formal documentation could produce lower reported prevalence without reducing actual need. Schools could face increasing demand with fewer attached resources.
Robin’s case reveals the inverse paradox: documentation exists, funding flows, service does not reach him. The restructured system risks producing its mirror image: need persists, documentation shrinks, funding declines.
In both scenarios, the child remains underserved.
Inter-ministerial misalignment
Robin’s situation spans ministries.
Education receives designation funding.
Children and Family Development restructures disability supports.
Health absorbs mental health fallout.
Social Development will one day bear adult income assistance costs if educational exclusion persists.
No ministry holds longitudinal responsibility. Each optimises within its fiscal cycle.
From a siloed perspective, cost containment within one department appears rational. From a whole-of-government perspective, it may be devastating.
A child’s life unfolds over decades. Budgets operate on annual cycles.
This temporal mismatch produces predictable distortions.
Legibility and managed suffering
Provinces govern what they can measure. They measure attendance rates, severity levels, diagnostic categories, expenditure totals.
They struggle to measure masked distress, parental compensation, slow erosion.
Robin functioned for years because his parent filled gaps the system left open. That labour rendered his suffering less visible. When collapse came, it appeared abrupt. In reality, it was cumulative.
If funding models require visible severity, families face a quiet dilemma: invest privately to prevent collapse and risk being deemed insufficiently impaired, or allow visible deterioration to establish eligibility.
No policy states this explicitly. Yet thresholds shape behaviour.
A humane system would recognise managed suffering as evidence of need, not as proof of adequacy.
The question beneath the policy
The restructuring of disability funding is framed as equity. It expands eligibility to additional diagnostic categories. That expansion addresses long-standing exclusions. Families previously denied support deserve inclusion.
But redistribution within a fixed or modestly expanded envelope forces trade-offs. Some children gain. Others lose. The rhetoric of fairness masks the arithmetic of scarcity.
The deeper question is not whether inclusion should expand. It is whether expansion required contraction elsewhere.
Robin sits in his room while funding flows through bureaucratic channels in his name. His early intervention succeeded. His school supports eroded. His nervous system collapsed. His designation remains active. His education does not.
Is the system designed to prevent collapse, or only to respond once collapse becomes undeniable?
If early intervention returns multiple dollars for every dollar spent, if school exclusion predicts higher lifetime cost, if caregiver burnout reduces workforce participation, if administrative burden excludes the most overwhelmed, then reducing stabilising supports is not neutral fiscal management.
It is deferral.
Robin is not a statistic. He is a stress test. If policy cannot account for a cognitively intact autistic child in severe burnout — funded but functionally excluded — then it cannot claim to be aligned with either economic prudence or substantive equality.
The spreadsheet may balance.
The child does not.