All it really takes is awareness. There's a lot of untapped talent in these states where for most most kids CS isn't even on the map as a career path, where I'm from smart kids get told to be doctors or lawyers. I didn't start coding until I was in college and went from nothing to full stack development with some machine learning skills in 12 months through self-teaching. I wish I'd had something like this when I was younger. Even if the implementation is awful some kids will take to it like a sponge and continue learning on their own.
I totally agree with what you said. I'm really quite sad how late I got into programming (at 14) by basically some random occurrence. Yeah, at the moment I'm ahead of my peers by significant amounts, but I know I could have done\would be doing a lot more, a lot more efficiently if I had had any formal education from the start on related topics, lessons that start with the sentence "Today we're learning how to use Microsoft Word" don't really count.
