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Brockton High senior Armani Lopes dreams of building his own home.Brockton High senior Armani Lopes dreams of building his own home BROCKTON — Armani Lopes, a senior at Brockton High School, imagines building a solid life as a carpenter.He enjoys the creativity of the trade.Outside school, he’s built an insulated shed, and a studio where he makes music, mostly R&B.He sees himself using what he earns to buy a plot of land in or near Brockton and his skills to build a house where his future family will be comfortable.Heather Arrighi, Brockton High’s Career Technical Education (CTE) guidance counselor, has noticed skilled trades are increasingly seen as a reasonable alternative to college.'Find the dignity of work': New program serving adults with disabilities opens to Brockton But, for kids doing CTE and planning to go straight to work after high school, like Lopes, Arrighi worries about whether they’ll stay on track without all the support they received in school.She wants to know for sure, before they graduate, that they’re going to begin building a career.“I also worry, as a guidance counselor, once they leave, if they don’t have a solid plan, … that they’ll kind of get lost,” she said.‘Teaching them how to fish.’ During a recent event encouraging high schoolers to pursue careers in construction, Frank Baxter, a business representative for a carpenter’s union in Southeastern Massachusetts, showed students how to properly hammer nails and use power tools to put screws into wood and drywall.Lopes walked up to Baxter and shook his hand.“Remember me?” Lopes asked.Baxter did – he’d recently presented to kids in Brockton High’s carpentry program and told them about the option of joining the union right out of high school.With many union members nearing retirement, the union is making a particular effort to recruit young people.When union carpenters are just starting out, they make a bit over $22 per hour, plus health insurance and, after two years, a pension.After four years of carpentry school – which includes a significant amount of paid, on-the-job training – they make around $51 per hour.That’s roughly $100,000 per year.People can even advance to senior construction manager, also known as a superintendent, Baxter said, and make $60 or $70 per hour.High demand for Brockton High CTE: The school's vocational programs have a waitlist for the first time It’s a good time to enter this profession, according to Baxter.Right now, he said there’s lots of work to go around, with about 90% of around 900 of his union's members currently employed.Even when there’s an economic downturn, and there are few large construction projects to work on, Baxter said union carpenters can get by.“What’s great about the carpenter’s union is they give you the skills to go out and earn money to – if you want to build a deck, or do a bathroom renovation,” he said.“It’s a skill that no one could take away from you,” said Decio Santos, who was teaching kids basic carpentry skills alongside Baxter.“We’re teaching them how to fish.” ‘Actually create a living’ Lopes has been doing carpentry classes while at Brockton High.Now 18, and about to graduate, he’s planning to sign up for carpentry school, but hadn’t yet had a chance to when he spoke with The Enterprise during the May 15 event organized by the MassHire Greater Brockton Workforce Board.Arrighi, Lopes’ guidance counselor, looked on as Santos helped him use a drywall screw gun.When Arrighi started at Brockton High in 2011, she said the focus was only on getting kids to go to college.The same was true when Arrighi, herself a Brockton High graduate, was a student there.“Now, thank goodness, the culture around that is changing, and we see it’s an equal, if not sometimes more profitable, opportunity for kids, because they leave without debt – it has no college debt,” she said.The goal is to get CTE students like Lopes into careers in the skilled trades.“We know job-to-job-to-job is a tough way to earn a livable wage.In a union or career opportunity like this,” she said, of the carpenter’s union, “we know that they can grow within these companies, within these unions and be able to actually create a living that is gonna get them somewhere – or, get them the family, the house, all the things they dream about.” But as Lopes and his peers graduate from high school and cast off into the wider world, they must make weighty life decisions – without the input of their counselors and other trusted adults at school.Lopes said he loves Brockton, and is emphatic about staying near the city as he enters adulthood.“We all come together,” he said.“… People only see it as a deadly place, but you really gotta look at it, like, these people aren’t dying for no reason.These people are dying for years of anger.” Send education reporter Jacob Posner story ideas or news tips at JPosner@enterprisenews.com This article originally appeared on The Enterprise: Brockton High student plans to build career in carpentry