Woman, 29, enrols in high school pretending to be 15 years old

A woman attended high school for several days pretending to be a teenager (Representative Image)

A 29-year-old woman pretended to be a teenager and attended a New Jersey public high school for four days before she was caught. Her ruse has raised safety concerns and left students and their parents worried about her possible motivation for posing as a student, with some fearing that she might have been attempting to lure young people into sex work, New Brunswick Today reported.

Students say that the woman – identified by police as Hyejeong Shin – sat in on classes and collected phone numbers from high school teens. She continued to text her former classmates for days after her subterfuge was discovered.

District authorities have told students to stop communicating with her.

Shin was arrested on Tuesday (January 24) and charged with providing documents that falsified her age, according to the New York Times.

“She was here for four days before being found out, and barred from entering the district property,” school superintendent Aubrey Johnson told the Board of Education. “All appropriate authorities were immediately notified, and the individual in question has now been arrested for providing false documentation.”

Johnson said the district would look into “how to better look for fake documentation and other things.”

Shin had enrolled in New Brunswick High School claiming to be 15-years-old. In New Jersey, schools are required to enrol all students provisionally, even if they can’t provide requisite documents at the time. Students then have 30 days to provide the required identity documents or are declared ineligible.

Shin raised suspicions when school officials could not determine the identity of her parents or legal guardian. She was being questioned by officials when she asked to sign herself out of school, was told she could not do that as a minor and then revealed her real age to be 29, a source told New Brunswick Today.