@fu The idea is that your teen probably needs to successfully finish school, so she isn't still doing that same low-wage, no-benefits job thirty years from now. And yes, that does happen.

What these pollies are trying to do is give companies compliant and helpless workers, so they don't have to raise pay and benefits enough to attract currently unwilling adults.

Even in SoCal, I knew a girl who quit high school because $FAST_FOOD_PLACE promised to make her a manager with a sizable raise. A year or so later, after the promotion and raise hadn't come, she changed to another FFP employer ... according to someone from the old neighborhood, she wound up perishing in a suspicious single-vehicle crash a few years later.

That said, if you and your spouse are home schooling your kids, one of you should be the relevant school principal. City Prep's principal has no record of how well students from outside that school are doing.