When it comes to friendly faces at Suffolk’s Ammerman campus, none seem more recognizable than a cashier in the Babylon Student Center cafeteria who everyone refers to as “Miss Nancy.”
Walking through her prep work for the day, from the sushi bar to the coffee machine, everything must first meet her approval.
At the cash register on a recent day, Miss Nancy greeted students – who she affectionately calls “her kids” – with a smile and engaged in friendly chit-chat while swiftly processing orders.
“I was raised a Born-Again Christian — love thy neighbor as yourself. That is love, Miss Nancy said. “My father was a pastor who helped to build churches. He built 16 churches across Long Island and Brooklyn.”
She truly does do it all.
Joining Suffolk in 2023 after working 17 years at Hauppauge High School as a lunch lady, Miss Nancy has also worked as a quality control manager for an engineering company, which she received no formal schooling for.
“Back then there wasn’t a big check where they would check you out, so I just walked in and started picking up things as quickly as possible,” she said.
Miss Nancy takes special care to look after every student at Suffolk, even stopping to help a student who had lost their car keys.
“What can I say? I love all my kids. I used to tell my high school students that I have at least a hundred kids,” she said.
As friendly as she is with students, she’s also shy. She explained that her husband of 26 years convinced her to speak to Compass News. Her husband that she met on a radio station call-in date line “I thought, ‘Oh, well, one day I’ll call in’ not that I needed to. But one day I called in and we hit it off. Two years later, we were married.”
A true Renaissance woman, Miss Nancy has lived a wealth of experiences and believes what we put out into the world will come back to us.
“Leave it all at home. Come to school and focus on what’s important– the love and light of God and applying yourself.”
