“Just thinking about him being at a hospital without his family there, I was just sad for him,” she said about her student, Nathaniel “Nate” Innocent Riccio, who was then 7. ”While at the hospital, Riccio chatted with a social worker from the Connecticut Department of Children and Families about Nate’s foster situation and learned that the family he was staying with lived about an hour away from his school, Walsh Elementary School in Waterbury, Conn. Nate has ambitions to become an actor one day and has participated in several acting workshops at a local theater