For the past few months, Garcie Champagne and her class at Boston Adult Technical Academy near Back Bay have been working on a production of “A Raisin In The Sun.” It’s Lorraine Hansberry’s play about a black family moving into a white neighborhood.
Her student, Erickson Alves, has been practicing his lead role as Walter Younger.
“We had just had class earlier that day and he had just given this amazing performance,” she said. “And to go from that amazingly positive thing to having to talk to him about, ‘Hey, today’s your last day’ — I honestly did not know how to handle that.”
Boston Adult Technical Academy is designed to meet the needs of students aged 19-22 who have recently entered the United States or returned after dropping out of school. Alves is one of about 20 students at theschool and one of nearly 140 students in the district who will be 22 or older by the end of the school year and will have to leave school.