He never finished high school; in fact, he was kicked out, three times. Bullied, troubled and at odds with academia in his youth, single dad Jamie Bryant is as surprised as anyone that at nearly 40, he’s close to graduating with a Bachelor of Biomedical Science from UniSC. Maybe, all he needed was the right motivation, found in the form of a tiny, premature baby, with just a slim chance to live.
Soon after Jamie started high school, his beloved grandfather died, sending Jamie into a depressive spiral.
“I went through a suicidal phase, and instead of receiving support, I feel the school looked for any way to get me out,” he said. “It was a different era.”
He was expelled for the first time, setting the stage for the rest of his tumultuous academic experience traversing a total of five high schools where he kept finding himself at odds with the school system.
“I was bullied a lot, about my lazy eye and that I was overweight, so I’d never really say I had a lot of friends. I just wasn’t meshing well at school and I went off the rails, which led to a second expulsion,” he said.
At 16, he left home and started living in a car he bought for $350, as well as in halfway houses, until his sister took him in.
He enrolled at yet another high school, but it wasn’t long before he got into a “bit of trouble outside of school” and his bag containing an almost-finished assignment was stolen. He was given the chance to work with a friend to rewrite the assignment, but after handing it in late, he was sent to see the deputy.
“The deputy said they were expelling me because I hadn’t handed in the assignment… it wasn’t anything else, just this one assignment. I pulled it out, threw it on the table, said a few expletives, walked out and that was it, I never went back to school.”
