As a Franciscan University graduate living in Wausau, Wisconsin, Beth (Ellis ’99) Mergen never expected to be teaching with three fellow alumni let alone doing so in a Catholic school.
“I had felt so isolated in Wausau being a Franciscan alum,” she says, adding she rarely met other alumni in the community where she and her husband, Bryan, were raising their three sons. Furthermore, she had only taught in public schools since graduating, believing strongly in the importance of being a Catholic witness in that setting.
So when her then-pastor, Father Samuel Martin, asked her to pray about teaching at the school he planned to re-open at Holy Name of Jesus Parish, her first reaction was “no way.” Although she had served on the steering and investigation committee for the classical school, which is part of the Newman Catholic Schools, she says, “I was homeschooling my boys, and I didn’t want to go back to teaching.”
Despite her initial reluctance, she accepted a position for the 2024-25 school year teaching Grades K-2, joining an all-Franciscan staff consisting of Jimmy Lynch ’11, who is headmaster, and sisters Anna McCarty ’18, who teaches Grades 4-5, and Ellie McCarty ’21, who teaches Grades 6-8. A fourth teacher for Grades 2-3 was added for the 2025-26 school year but is not a Franciscan graduate.
Before her marriage in 2009, Beth had taught preschool in the Steubenville City Schools and kindergarten in the Jefferson County Public Schools in Colorado. She and Bryan initially enrolled their sons in Catholic schools, but after COVID decided to homeschool, which they did for four years. They now have one son in fifth grade at the school where Beth teaches, one in seventh grade at Newman Catholic Middle School in Wausau, and another, a freshman, at Wausau East High School.
Beth says Franciscan prepared her well to both teach in a school and to homeschool her children.
“The University gave me a very solid, faith-based education, helped me to seek the truth and seek what was good and to stand firm in those things I know to be good and true and beautiful.”
She also has seen the fruits of a Franciscan education at work among her colleagues at Newman Catholic Classical: Holy Name.
“We have Franciscan alumni at our school who love the faith and love teaching. I witness it daily in the way my coworkers speak to kids and interact with parents, and in the virtuous way they choose to live their personal lives. Franciscan helped prepare us for this vocation, and I am so grateful.”
