ON BOARD WITH DEBORAH HODGES

To give you an opportunity to know them better, each edition of our Newsletter profiles a member of your alumnae association’s Board of Directors.  Elected by the general membership of the Association, Board members, along with the officers of the Association, serve as your representatives in setting Board policy, establishing goals and objectives for the association and providing continuing support for the historic mission of our alma mater, Mississippi University for Women. “On Board” focused this time on Deborah Stockman Hodges, class of 1990.

By Jimmie Meese Moomaw, ‘58

Deborah Hodges, class of 1990, will begin her second term as Treasurer of the original and historic alumnae association, now going by its new name of Mississippi’s First Alumnae Association.

If there is a common denominator that characterizes all of the members of the Board of Directors, it is how each describes the value of the education she received at the W and how it shaped or reshaped her life.  Deborah learned about MUW and was encouraged to attend by her high school English teacher, W alumnae, Mary Ann Lathan. 

She attended the W on a Centennial Scholarship, majored in Accounting and maintained her excellence in academic performance.   She was selected for membership in Mortar Board, where she served as Treasurer.  She was also elected a SGA Senator.  In addition to her studies and extra curricular activities she worked full-time while she was in college as “the walking delivery girl” for a downtown ice cream and sandwich shop.

At the W, Deborah was an accounting major.  She subsequently became a Certified Public Accountant and joined an accounting firm in Mobile.  In 2007 she became a partner in that firm which now carries her name – Pritchard, Dewberry & Hodges.

Deborah continues to combine her professional and service goals.  She is currently the Treasurer of Mississippi’s First Alumnae Association and President of the Board of Directors of the Women’s Business Center of Southern Alabama, an organization dedicated to helping women find economic empowerment  by starting and growing their own small business.

She is married to Jim Hodges with whom she eloped the week of her W graduation in 1990.  They have three children, Cole, Clay, and Caelin and live on a small farm in George County on a small farm with cows and goats and a soon to be retired barrel-racer named Prissy.  Her favorite activity includes travel with her family.  She says they travel with no reservations and no real plan except their one end point destination.  This way of traveling has taken the family through the by-ways and back roads of 24 states…so far and to sites as far ranging as John Wayne’s birth and a stop on Route 66 in Winslow, Arizona where she says we did, in fact see a “a girl, my lord in a flat-bed ford.”

Deborah says “The thing I treasure most about the W is that is the place where I got to feel empowered enough to be me.  My education has served me well professionally and I have never thought I could not or would not succeed.” She also recalls that when she was a student she spent “my entire four years watching various alums and how they handled themselves and how accomplished they were.”

Though now she is a leader among alums in her own right, she confesses that she still has a great deal of admiration for other Mississippi women who have set the standards for achievement and success and who are models of what W grads can become. 

“How can you sit at the table with Justice Kay Cobb and Judge Payne and Betty Lou Jones,” she asks “and not be star-struck?”