Young, Gifted, Ambitious Teen Earns College Degree, High School Diploma 1 Week Apart

By Taki S. Raton

Grace Bush receives a check from members of the Boca Raton Sunset Rotary Club recently. She was named the Club’s Student of the Year.

Music is a stress reliever for Grace Bush. Her academics are balanced out by playing the flute both for the Miami Music Project Orchestra and the South Florida Youth Symphony.

Her ultimate career goal is to be Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

She is young, gifted and Black.

At the still flowering age of 16, Bush received her college degree in criminal justice at Florida Atlantic University graduating ceremony on Friday, May 2.

And just a week later, on May 9, Bush graduated as a high school senior from Florida Atlantic University High School.

“It’s kind of weird that I graduated college before high school,” she said. “I’m very relieved that I have it all done behind me and I’m looking forward to my future and what I can do now.”

How did she do it? Florida Atlantic University High School is a dual enrollment high school on FAU’s campus. FAU HS is not a part of the Palm Beach County School System but is a public school under the auspices of the State University System.

According to the FAU HS website, students spend their 9th grade in a traditional high school classroom setting but are pursuing advanced coursework.

Foundation is thereby anchored for grades 10 through 12 where all classes are college level taken at FAU for both high school and college credit.

So typically, when students graduate form FAU HS, they have already earned three years of college credits.

“I started when I was 13 at Broward College and I also took my classes throughout the summer,” Bush said. “So I was able to finish it before four years.”

She has taken a full load of classes every semester since to include those summers.

Although she strove for a 4.0 GPA, she did earn a few B’s and finished college with a 3.81.

On the secondary level, Bush had scored well enough on an FAU HS entrance exam to skip her freshman year and start as a sophomore.

So she was already high school accelerated. The family selected Broward College’s Hollywood campus for Bush to begin her college studies because that is where her sisters were also attending.

A year later, she transferred to FAU further combining her high school and college degree studies at the same time.

Grace is one of the youngest students to graduate from FAU in more than a century, according to school officials.

“It makes you realize regardless of age if you’ve got the abilities you should be allowed to accomplish your full potential,” FAU President John Kelly said.

Bush is the third oldest of nine children in her family and her mother, Gisla Bush, home-schooled all of her kids.

Gisla Bush’s youngest child is only 11 months old and her husband works as a human resource analyst for the city of Pompano Beach.

Mama Bush is the daughter of a roofer with a fifth grade education and is herself one of 10 siblings, all of whom graduated from college.

She studied architecture and law and credits Grace’s grandfather, William Chennault – a World War II veteran and grandson of enslaved parents – for their family’s work ethic.

Grace Bush was homeschooled until the age of 13 and began reading around the age of 2, her mother said. But the speed at which Grace could learn surprised even her mother.

“I sat her on my lap and read to her every day for a few minutes so that I could move on to do what I needed to do with my other kids,” Gisla Bush said.

“Then one day, I saw her reading by herself and from that point on, she did everything her sisters did. Reading as well as her older sister who was three years her senior.”

Disciplined to follow a demanding schedule, Grace rises at 5:30 a.m. daily from the family home in Hollywood, arriving at school before the first bell rings at 8 a.m. She would spend the next 14 hours combining high school and college classes to include a schedule for playing the flute in two orchestras.

She is home by 11 p.m. to study for three hours before drifting to sleep.

Grace never attended school dances, football games, parties or any other popular high school and college activities.

“I missed out on being a kid, goofing off and wasting time,” she said.

Her parents wanted all of their nine children to earn college credit while in high school because they could not afford to send them all to college.

Florida’s dual enrollment program would allow high performing students to take courses at local colleges for free before they graduate from high school thereby saving thousands of dollars.

“Everything was paid for, tuition, books, transportation. That was to our benefit,” she said. And home-schooling is really paying off for African American youth.

Grace’s oldest sister, Gisla, 19, named after their mother, also graduated from the dual program at FAU and is working on a master’s degree in urban planning. Sister Gabrielle, 17, is graduating from FAU this summer.

Her cousin, James Martin of Tamarac, graduated FAU and is now studying at Princeton.

Grace has assumed the title at FAU as being the youngest graduate this year and one of the youngest grads ever. Since FAU’s premier opening 50 years ago, 10 students aged 16 or younger have received a B.A. degree, the youngest being Edith Stern who in 1968 received her degree at the age of 15.

Stern received her master’s degree from Michigan State University at the age of 17 and would continue on to become a distinguished engineer and master inventor at IBM with 128 patents to her name.

Grace is planning to pursue a master’s degree at FAU this fall and then on to law school.

She will devote this summer to studying for the LSAT “so I can get as high a score as possible, so hopefully I can get a full ride into a good law school,” she said.