Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks FAQ #2: Did Skloot really flunk high school?

[image error]I'm posting answers to FAQs about my book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, as an ongoing series on this blog.  In my last FAQ post, I told the story of how I first learned about HeLa cells at sixteen.  A related question I often get has to do with this one sentence in the book's prologue:

"I was a kid who'd failed freshman year at the regular public high
school because she never showed up. I'd transferred to an alternative
school that offered dream studies instead of biology, so I...