MOUNT VERNON – Thousands of graduates this month will hear commencement speakers describe the road to success, a road that will bring challenges and setbacks but offer potential reward.
Judy Stahl Forney traveled that road, overcoming obstacles on a journey that began 25 years after high school. Her story inspires during this season of caps and gowns.
Ultimately, she would succeed on her own determination. But something she overheard her father say to a neighbor when she was a young girl would help to motivate her to enroll in college three decades later while juggling the roles of a single mother working full time.
Forney, now the treasurer of the Knox Educational Service Center in Mount Vernon, is a familiar face in Knox and Richland counties, where she is known simply as “Judy.”
She served long tenures as the treasurer for Lexington Local Schools (2003-2011) and Mount Vernon City Schools (2012-2019). She was elected to the Lexington School Board in 1996 and re-elected in 2000 before serving as an appointed member of the Mansfield City Schools board of education.
While many know Forney, most are unaware of the long, demanding road that led to her career goals.
Perhaps it was a hint of what was to come when she was elected treasurer of her junior and senior classes at Malabar High School on Mansfield’s south side. But college wasn’t in the cards when Judy Stahl graduated in 1967.
“We couldn’t afford it. Dad worked at Westinghouse and mom was a homemaker,” she recalled. “College simply wasn’t an option.”
During the nine years that followed, Forney would marry, have two children and work at Farmers Saving & Trust. In 1980, she began a 16-year stint as print production manager for the Mid-Ohio Educational Service Center in Mansfield.
The late ‘80s would prove to be a difficult period.
“Mom died in 1986. Dad died in 1987, one year to the day that we buried mom,” she said.
In 1989, her marriage broke up. Finances became tight.
For a couple of years, she supplemented her Mid-Ohio ESC income as a stringer for the Mansfield News Journal, covering school board meetings at Lexington, Lucas and Clear Fork.
“I got $30 for each story,” Forney said. “There was no email in those days. After each meeting I had to go home, type the story, then drive to the News Journal and put it in the outside drop box. Sometimes it was midnight before I finished, then I had to be at work by 8 the next morning.”
One day at the Mid-Ohio ESC, Forney mentioned to a co-worker her wish that she could go to college.
“I’d start college now, but I think I’m too old. I’ll be 40 next year,” Forney said.
Her co-worker’s response: “How old will you be next year if you don’t start college?”
That remark stuck with Forney. It took a while to get everything in place but she enrolled in North Central State College in 1992.
“I started college at 42, with a full-time job and two kids at home,” she said. “I definitely was a late bloomer.”
For three years, she attended classes at NCSC after work, traveling to and from the campus on Mansfield’s northwest side from her home near Snow Trails on the southeast side.
In 1995, she received an associate’s degree in accounting and finance. A bachelor’s degree in business administration and accounting from Ashland University followed in 1998 and a master’s in education and school finance from Ashland in 2003.
During her college years, Forney helped to support her children with a variety of odd jobs, including part-time work at the Richland County Law Library and proofreading the names in elementary school yearbooks. (“I got $5 per page to take them home and cross-check the names beneath the kids’ pictures with a master list of names.”)
She also sold tickets at Lexington High School football and basketball games.
“I was paid $17 per night. When there were back-to-back Friday-Saturday home basketball games, that meant $34, so I told my daughter we could get pizza for her and her friend,” she said.
All total, Forney has been a school treasurer for 20 years, including nearly three years at Bucyrus (1999-2002) and more than a year at Lucas (2002-2003).
She began work as the Knox ESC treasurer In March 2021, where she manages an annual budget of $5 million. The ESC has full-time employees at its Learning Center in Mount Vernon and at its preschool at the New Hope Early Education Center. It also hires classroom aides for its client districts – Centerburg, Clear Fork, East Knox, Fredericktown, Danville and Mount Vernon.
“My assistant and I manage all aspects of financial operations, including payroll twice a month, purchasing, payables, receivables and federal grants management,” Forney said. “We work cooperatively with our client district treasurers.”
Happily remarried for eight years, Forney has seen her two adult children achieve their own careers. She has four grandchildren: three in Mansfield and one in Dayton.
A lot of hard work and personal grit led to her professional success, but all along the way Forney would remember what she overheard her father say those many years ago.
“I was 12 or 13 and in my room at our house on Third Street in Mansfield when I heard my dad talking to a neighbor outside. He said, ‘The thing is with Judy that she can do anything she puts her mind to.’"
“I never forgot that,” she said. “I couldn’t let him down.”
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