Four Mother and Daughter Teams Serve Side by Side at St. Mark School

Family runs deep at St. Mark. Our classrooms are full of siblings, cousins, and the children of the people who teach them. What is more unusual is what is happening on the other side of the desk. Right now, four mothers and their daughters work here together as colleagues, teaching, aiding students, and running the front office.
Principal Terry Ferro, herself a St. Mark graduate and parishioner, sees the pattern as a blessing rather than a coincidence. The pairs, she said, “were called to be here together.”

Robin and Megan Workman

Robin and Megan started the trend. Robin spent a year volunteering in her daughter’s classroom before officially joining the staff in 2019, arriving with experience as a substitute teacher for Baltimore County Schools. Today she answers the phone in the school office and helps with before and after school care. Megan has been at St. Mark since 2011 and teaches third grade English language arts and math, along with students in kindergarten through fifth grade who have documented learning differences. The two commute together from Essex, where mornings can be uneven given that one of them is a morning person and the other is decidedly not.

Michele and Emily Taylor

Michele Taylor has taught at St. Mark for 29 years, and all of her children came through the school. This year her daughter Emily joined her as the instructional aide in her kindergarten classroom, a full circle moment for both of them. Emily is a St. Mark alumna and a graduate of the Community College of Baltimore County, and she is working toward becoming an early childhood educator. She admits it took some getting used to, sitting in a classroom she once sat in as a student and calling her former teachers by their first names.

Kathleen Bourassa and Lauren Malcotti

Kathleen has taught third grade at St. Mark for eight years. Her mother, Lauren, joined the staff three years ago and teaches grades five through eight in our program for students with documented learning differences, following years of teaching at Sacred Heart School in Glyndon. Their classrooms sit at opposite ends of the building, so they rarely cross paths during the school day. They greet each other in the morning and otherwise keep work and family neatly separate, which both of them credit for how well the arrangement works.

Keri Engel and Debbie Thore

Keri moved to Catonsville from New Jersey in 2011 and began teaching STEM at St. Mark. She also runs many of our after school clubs, which she sees as a low pressure place for students to explore something new. Her mother, Debbie, followed her to Maryland to be near her grandsons and has worked at St. Mark in several roles, from lunch attendant to her current position as the third and fourth grade instructional aide. A standing Wednesday lunch together is part of the routine.
What these four pairs share is a sense that St. Mark is worth showing up for twice over. Students notice, too. They know which teachers are related, and they see adults who have chosen to build both their careers and their family life inside the same faith community.

These families were featured in the February 2026 issue of the Catholic Review, in an article by Katie V. Jones with photography by Kevin J. Parks.