Helen Forman, seen in her 1934 graduation photograph from Rhode Island College of Education, and her husband, Sylvan Forman, invested wisely.

Photo Courtesy OF Rhode Island College

Helen Forman receives an honorary doctor of humanities degree from RIC in 1999.

Photo courtesy of Rhode Island CoLlege

PROVIDENCE — Helen Forman was a schoolteacher; her husband, Sylvan, a railway and postal worker.

They lived modestly in a simple two-bedroom home on Tyndall Avenue, but over the years had invested wisely in the stock market.

When friends asked Helen Forman why at times she was so frugal, she would often reply that she’d rather have her money go for scholarships at her beloved alma mater, Rhode Island College.

Yesterday, the school announced that Helen Forman, who died last year at 93, had left the school $5.1 million — the largest single gift ever given to a Rhode Island public institution for higher learning, says Rhode Island College.

“This is an extraordinary gift,” said Marguerite M. Brown, executive director of the Rhode Island College Foundation, which manages — including Forman’s gift — about $17 million in private financial gifts for the school. “This is important for public higher education because it reminds us that private support is needed for public higher education, and it can happen.”

Raised in Providence, the daughter of a tailor, Helen Ginsberg Forman graduated in 1934 from what was then Rhode Island College of Education. She became a special-education teacher and taught in every grade from kindergarten through high school.

She married Sylvan Forman, who graduated in 1933 from what was then Bryant-Stratton College of Business Administration with a degree in accounting. Sylvan Forman went to work for the U.S. Postal Service, Brown said, and “spent practically every lunch hour at the Providence Public Library researching investments.”

The couple invested in blue chip stocks such as General Electric, Dow Chemical and Procter & Gamble, and exercised an investment strategy of holding on through thick and thin.

Over time, as the Formans retired and Helen Forman spent more time volunteering at fund-raising events at her old college or taking in virtually every music, theater and dance performance there, the money grew.

In the early 1990s, Sylvan Forman died. In 1994, Helen Forman made her first large gift to the school in her husband’s memory.

She asked school president John Nazarian out to lunch and told him she wanted to do something in her husband’s memory for the school.

Nazarian spoke of how the school was in the process of renovating a building for a new admission office but was $250,000 short.

Says Brown: “Helen turned to her lawyer and said, ‘Can I afford that?’ and he said yes.”

The Forman Building, as the building is called now, houses not only the admissions office but several departments within the division of academic affairs.

Helen Forman left her fortune to the college. The Formans had one child, a son, but Helen Forman “had very little contact with him in her later years,” said Brown.

Most of her gift to the school will be used for endowed scholarship for the Department of Music, Theatre and Dance, said Brown. Some smaller portions will be used for special education and supporting the school library and the president’s annual chamber music series.

Rhode Island College will celebrate Forman’s gift during an event next Saturday in the school’s Nazarian Center.

The tribute will begin at 6 p.m. with a red-carpet reception, silent auction and a performance of Yellowman by Dael Orlandersmith, presented in partnership with the Providence Black Repertory Company.