Cooper Lavin is a 15-year-old tenth grader at Niverville High School. He’s also autistic and the coordinator of the school’s inaugural autistic awareness campaign.

To create awareness and encourage acceptance of neurodivergent people, Lavin, along with the school’s learning support teacher, Raelyn Voulgaris, assigned the last three days in April to the campaign.

On April 28, students at NHS wore rainbow-coloured or tie-dyed clothing to reflect the beauty and diversity of the human mind. Next came Magnificent Minds Day, with the donning of either a fun hat or crazy hair. After that was Sensory Friendly Day, which encouraged that comfy clothing be worn to school, including pyjamas, to create awareness of the sensory sensitivity so many autistic people experience on a day-to-day basis.

“I’m not doing full-on activism,” Lavin says. “I’m just trying to spread the word about the hardships that come with [autism].”

In planning his campaign, Lavin chose the symbol of a rainbow to provide visual representation for autism.

“In my opinion, rainbows are the colour of chaos and autism is just chaotic,” says Lavin. “There is an explosion of information in your brain at all times. Rainbows are every colour and that represents autism because there are so many different types of it.”

Other autism awareness campaigns around the world have used the puzzle piece as a symbol, but Lavin feels this creates connotations that neurodiverse people are incomplete or need to be fixed.

There is some distinction as well, for Lavin, between autism awareness and autism acceptance. Through these NHS events, Lavin hopes to have accomplished some of both.

“Sometime in the 1800s, people realized that the way they were treating black Americans [was inhumane],” says Lavin. “They needed to have better lives and that was the awareness. Later, people like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King said, ‘Now that you guys know that this isn’t how it should be, we need to fix it.’ That’s acceptance.”

The sad reality, though, is that it generally takes a long time for society to pass from awareness to acceptance.

The first diagnosis of autism, Lavin says, occurred less than 100 years ago. In the grander scheme of things, that’s still fairly recent. Being realistic, Lavin says that autistic or neurodivergent people probably won’t be fully accepted as “normal” until long after his generation is gone.

Still, awareness must begin somewhere. And one of his goals is to teach people that living with autism has its pros and cons.

“One [pro] that I’ve seen a lot of autistic people have is a heightened sense of justice and wanting to help other people,” he says. “We also seem to have a pretty good memory. We probably won’t be the best at multiple things. But if an autistic person has a specific hobby, we call it a hyper-fixation. They are almost for sure going to be the best person in the room at that thing.”

Other autistic minds lean in the direction of genius. Lavin suggests that brilliant men like Nikola Tesla and Albert Einstein are believed to have been autistic.

William James Sidis, too, is thought to have had an autistic bent with his IQ of between 250 and 300. He had the ability to speak 25 different languages and dialects.

For Lavin, he certainly wouldn’t call himself a genius, but he does have notable gifts.

“I think the best thing that I would credit my autism for is my social skills. I feel like you can’t really judge your own charisma, but I have been told that I am charismatic.”

Lavin may be less aware that he himself is an astute observer of humankind and bears the ability to articulate his thoughts with incredible maturity. He might credit this to strong parental support. His mother and father, too, deal with different levels of neurodivergence.

“All three of us being neurodivergent might make the world more difficult for us, but it makes us easier for each other,” says Lavin. “All three of us have the same way of seeing good things other people can’t and being blind to some of the things they can see.”

As for Voulgaris, the teacher is thrilled when students like Lavin take initiative by developing strategies for building awareness and acceptance of all kinds of diversity within the school community.

“We need people like [Cooper] to be leaders in our building and to be bringing awareness, education, and better understanding,” Voulgaris says.