An important reason it's a school failure story is that the 0.13 GPA all those absences earned him was 50th percentile (!!) at the school. In some sense the guy

An important reason it's a school failure story is that the 0.13 GPA all those absences earned him was 50th percentile (!!) at the school. In some sense the guy should have gone to class, but he's an impressionable high schooler, and it seems clear the school was setting an expectation that you don't really have to.