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I would say I had an overall "happy" experience, but not necessarily one that was good for me or prepared me very well for college/life.
I grew up in a rust-belt exurb of about 20k people in the 80s/90s. The economy of the area was more of less fully gutted by the time I started school. There were very few issues with class distinctions as the families in the area ranged from working class to extremely poor. There were a handful of what would now be considered lower middle-class kids: this children of accountants or managers of some sort. Anyone who could at all afford it sent their kids to private school 15 miles away, or just moved. The town is presently at about 7k population, from a high of 35k in 1950. There are entirely residential blocks that once had 15-25 houses on either side that now have 5-10, and sometimes none, with brown-fields where there houses used to be. In the last decade they've managed to plant grass and make decent fields out of them that the residents can use for various recreational activities. Things probably reached rock bottom around 1994 or so, its actually a lot nicer now than when I lived there. Clever local politicians managed to secure a good amount of money from the state and feds in the late 90s through various schemes. Recently boomers from all over the country have started to retire there, its on the coast of a Great Lake where they are building retirement mansions, the cost of living is very low, and its 99% white with virtually no Jews. I mention this last point as its been surfaced by the retirees I've spoken to about why they chose to move there, repeatedly, without prompting.
The school district itself was dirt poor. In retrospect this is at least part of what made the experience not so bad; low expectations. There was almost never any homework b/c we couldn't afford to take the books out of the classroom and many times two kids would have to share a single text book while in class. Most of the types of study that are now assigned as homework we just did during normal class hours, as soon as the bell rang at the end of the day were were free. The material was very basic reading/writing/math based stuff up through 8th grade. There was no real tracking or dividing of the kids by ability at all; everyone had the exact same experiences. Dividing the kids started in highschool with a few options for more advanced math and science. I first heard the term "Advanced Placement" as a freshman in college.
There was no art until 9th grade and students families needed to pay for all the supplies. Music, being band and choir, started in 6th grade at the middle school and the costs were the same as how it worked in art class, which the exception of a number of left over instruments donated by the parents of previous generations in various states of repair. I was very involved in the band from the beginning and was the part I enjoyed the most. At no level anywhere could the district afford anything like shop or home-ec classes. There were a grand total of 2 busses that only collected the kids that lived very far away. I walked about 3 miles to middle school, which was on the edge of town at the time. It was actually a blast; since almost all the kids had to walk there it became a horde of kids all walking together by the time we arrived. I'd wait at the end of my block of the growing mass of students to pass by every morning and fall into line with them. They same thing happened in reverse at the end of the day. This actually caused problems for the town at large to have 150+ 11-13 year olds suddenly unleashed on the town at 3pm every weekday. A police car often shadowed the horde of kids at a distance both coming and going. We had a blast. There was a county wide vocational school option starting in 10th grade for kids who wanted to go in to the trades. The HS sports teams were funded almost entirely by parents and local businesses pooling money.
How were your relationships with your teachers and peers? Not too bad tbh. We'd occasionally get kids who transferred in, or out, who would comment about how there weren't really any cliques in the school. In reality there were two groups with almost no interaction. Roughly 85% of the kids had parent(s) that worked, provided a modest but stable home life, and had roughly similar material conditions. These kids all more of less got along. The remainder were the extremely poor kids who's families were associated with generational welfare/benefits collection. They didn't work and didn't want to. Their kids tended to drop out as soon as they could, some went to the vocational school. They got teenage pregnant more frequently and often expelled for various reasons. These kids were often the grandchildren of people who had migrated north from Appalachia and the US south after WWII for industrial work that was quickly to vanish. They tended to have Irish and Scotts-Irish last names, where the rest of the town were the descendants of German, Italian, English, Northern and Eastern European immigrants from before WWI. So many people were on various forms of gov't assistance that the 1st of the month was basically a local holiday.
I got along with my teachers mostly because I didn't cause problems. If your grades were acceptable, you passed the very low bar of standardized testing, and you didn't make trouble you were generally left alone to goof off after your work was done. I actually did "misbehave" a great deal as a teenager, but was, and still am, extremely careful and circumspect about it. My misdeeds, as they were, always started with how I planned to get away with it.
How involved were your parents in your schooling? As little as possible. I was raised by an alcoholic, mentally ill single mother. Her own problems were so overwhelming to her she had very little mental capacity to be a positive influence on the lives of her children. Once I learned how to reliably stop getting in trouble she had nothing to do with the school anymore. The last time she went to a parent/teacher event or any sort of school function or open house was probably when I was 10. I got straight As from 9th grade one, and was obviously smarter than basically all the adults in my life by 16 or so, which went a long way in this regard. She skipped by graduation so she could sleep in.
Surely there are ‘virtually no Jews’ in the vast majority of the US. What were their negative experiences with Jewish people if you asked?
"Jews" tends to be a proxy for big city businessmen with no connection to the community. A lot of scams and white collar crimes take time to prosecute. Someone from the city can swoop in, do negative things, and be gone before they be stopped or prosecuted. Small town lawyers find themselves having to move against a legal entity that was dissolved before they could make their case.
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They never really elaborated, beyond "how nice" it was. Of note however many of them were moving from either Florida or the greater NYC area. I only mentioned it because of how often I've heard it after asking, somewhat incredulously at first "why would you chose to retire here of all places?" I usually stopped talking to them after something like this to be honest. My wife's family is Jewish and I'm not really interested in that line of conversation.
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