HE WAS 16, a 10th grader at Heritage High School in Brentwood, feeling that he had outgrown the pace of his classes. Instead of asking a counselor what came next, at home he turned to Reddit with a question he couldn’t find an answer to at school: How early could he actually leave high school?
That search pulled him into online forums where students shared stories about alternative pathways and escape routes out of the traditional system. Within months, he was on a different track entirely: leaving Heritage for community college while still a teenager. The year was 2022, and as far as anyone knows, he was the first East Contra Costa County student to blaze this trail. Others have followed.
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