Marge Miller Jock didn’t care if her students grew up to be rich and famous. She only wanted them to be good people.
“She loved the kids and she really wanted to make sure that the kids can find a goal,” recalled Marge’s mother, Friede Miller. “If one of the kids had a good attitude — they wanted to be good or do good — that’s what she wanted.”
Marge taught family and consumer sciences (FACS) at Ray Middle School for 22 years. The New York State Association of Family and Consumer Sciences Educators named her “Teacher of the Year” twice.
After her death in 2013 from pancreatic cancer, the Margaret Miller Jock Memorial Scholarship was set up through Baldwinsville Dollars for Scholars.
So far, two graduating Baker High School seniors have each received $1,000 in memory of Marge.
This year, the scholarship committee is seeking to create an endowment for the fund with a goal of $25,000. Phil Nagy, a classmate and friend of Marge’s, created a GoFundMe campaign last month.
“She always had a real desire to help those kids who needed a little extra help,” Miller said. “That would be in her spirit to have it continue.”
“Marge and I went all the way through school together from first grade on at St. Mary’s to Durgee to Baker,” Nagy said. “Baldwinsville was her only teaching position. That’s where she started, and sadly, that’s where she ended, too.”
Marge carried out her lifelong dream of becoming a teacher in Baldwinsville, where she grew up. Nagy said B’ville is the only district at which Marge ever taught, to his knowledge.
“She was a teacher with all her might and all her soul,” Miller said. “She wanted to be a teacher from the time she was 5 years old.”
Nagy reconnected with Marge when his own three children went through her FACS class.
“My children got to know her through [her] being their teacher and they got to realize that she was something special,” Nagy said.
Marge faithfully attended every graduation, even though she hadn’t had those seniors in class for six or seven years.
“She just had to be there to wish her kids well,” Nagy said.
Nagy said when he thanked Marge for teaching his children, she “just burst out crying.”
“It’s just so touching and heartwarming to know you’ve been a part of these kids’ lives,” he told her.
In addition to attending their graduations, Miller said, Marge would write notes of congratulation to former students who “made good.” But Miller said Marge had a soft spot for the students who needed a little more help in school, too.
“You didn’t have to be the star, and you didn’t have to be totally gifted and talented,” Miller said. “She was a champion of the underdog.”
Over the two decades of her career, Marge was pleased to see the children of former students pass through her classroom.
“She just always glowed when she … had second and almost third generation kids in her class,” Miller said. “She really liked the whole family, that it goes on.”
Miller said her daughter never forgot a student’s face. She said she once accompanied Marge to a local pharmacy, where a new employee remembered his FACS teacher fondly.
“You taught me how to sew a button on something, and that really impressed my fiancée,” Miller recalled the young man saying.
One project Marge often assigned to her students over the years was to sew bags for people with walkers. Miller called Marge the “Johnny Appleseed of walker bags,” as Marge always had a steady supply of walker bags to donate to local nursing homes.
“Over the years, they gave away hundreds of walker bags,” Miller said.
Even outside her career as an educator, Marge always looked for ways to help others. Miller said Marge supplied ailing friends and neighbors with a “traveling pot of mac and cheese” or baked goods.
“Whenever somebody was sick … she had cookies by the hundreds,” Miller said. “She was always cooking and baking for somebody, to her very last weeks that she was able to.”
During Marge’s illness, Miller said, the B’ville community came together to help her family. The scholarship is a way they can say thank you for that help.
“B’ville is a good place to be and people help people a lot, so it would be wonderful if [the endowment] came to pass,” Miller said.
Nagy, who graduated in 1981 with Marge, said she was just as devoted to her hometown as it was to her.
“In our yearbook, 1981, she was one of two voted ‘most school spirited.’ That was her all the way. Her blood was red [for B’ville] instead of orange for Syracuse,” Nagy said. “It’s important to keep her legacy and her memory alive.”
To donate to the Margaret Miller Jock Memorial Scholarship fund, visit gofundme.com/f83rstgk.
