Staff Spotlight: Lauren Salamone, the Hampshire School’s teacher.
One day last month, Lauren Salamone noticed some writing on a picture she kept at her desk.
Someone had taken it – a group photo of students in the Hampshire School last year – and wrote:
we were the first. “I love the pride in that,” Lauren says. “I’m finding it really gratifying to see
how meaningful this program has been for these students…. There’s an intimacy I think that
comes from an environment like this. We know a lot about each other’s’ lives, and we’re there
for each other when students need some support.”
Lauren has been teaching high school for about twenty years, but this is her first job with New
York City’s Department of Education District 79 (the division that oversees alternative schools,
including The Hampshire School Program at Friends of Island Academy).
The Hampshire School, located in a penthouse suite of the Night Hotel in Midtown, provides
specialized High School Equivalency classes during the day and paid internships at night for
Friends’ youth members – young people who have been involved in the criminal justice system.
The school developed out of a collaboration between by Friends of Island Academy, the
Hampshire Hotel Company and the NYC Department of Education/District 79.
The Hampshire School would not have been possible without Hampshire President and CEO,
Sant Singh Chatwal, who opened his doors and his heart to our youth members – as have many
on the hotel’s staff.
Now in its second year, The Hampshire School has become a tight community. “We enjoy being
together,” says Lauren. “Sometimes I present this as, ‘this is going to become your second
home,’ and that’s what I see happening with many of the students…. One of my students said to
me one day, ‘we’re so used to people saying what we shouldn’t do, but you have been saying
from day one what we’re capable of and what we can achieve.” Another student, after passing
his High School Equivalency test, told Lauren, “I can’t do it anywhere else. You challenge us
and we get all the support we need, and I wouldn’t have achieved this without you.”
Over the past decade, Ms. Salamone added another job to her work with teens: life coaching,
which coaxes people to “take a look at where they are, where they want to go, and helping them
get to their goal,” she says. Lauren believes the Hampshire School is a perfect fit for her because
“it gives me the opportunity to be both a teacher and a coach. And that’s the beauty of the
program here at Hampshire…. [I saw] what a difference it makes to have another adult involved
in teens’ lives, to be part of that journey.”
The Hampshire School is at full capacity this year – in the words of Mr. Chatwal, “no vacancy.”