Thanks Everyone - I am in shock there are 50 plus replies so quickly.
First off I want to say this isn't a post like many other about how expensive flight training is and how difficult it is to come up with the money. We work hard for what little "extra" money we have and allocate a majority of that to my sons endeavors. We generally spend about $4-5k every year on snowboard coaching and summer camps as a reward for him continuing to have excellent grades and being a standount young man who participates in numerous volunteer opportunities. My son really wants to learn to fly and we are considering paying for it using the already allocated funds. He will not need to find a job to pay for it at this point. We want him to be the first college graduate in our immediate family and these "rewards" have been part of our incentive plan to encourage him to continue to do well in school.
Great advice on several of the websites. I probably should have stated that I have found every school in Northern Califonria and am familiar with every airport in Northern California. We have already called or emailed several schools to discuss possible training. Only 2 showed much interest in a teen. Several didn't even return an email or return a call. Ideally we would like for him to train in Sacramento or Davis but if the right situation comes up we might be willing to go a little farther.
We had not looked in to civil air patrol. I showed my son the website today and he is interested in it. We emailed for more info and well see how it goes. The only issue might be the time commitment as he is already quite busy at this point.
We also had not considered glider lessons. I will look in to it further as it sounds great. However, with money not growing on trees I am not sure I would spend money on something that wouldn't help him to ultimately achieve his ppl. If I understand correctly glider lessons would not counts as hours towards what he ultimately needs for a ppl and he would essentially be starting from scratch if we went that route.
We did reach out to the local EAA a couple of weeks ago. It looks like our chapter in Sacramento might have got shut down.
http://www.eaa52.org/ There info is 2 plus years out fo date at this point and emails have been ignored.
I will continue to monitor the forums and post about his journey.
Thanks for the help