A new program in St. Louis is seeking out professionals looking to leave the corporate grind and find satisfaction in the classroom. The St. Louis Teacher Residency hopes a different approach to finding teachers will make a big difference for kids in inner-city schools.

Gennean Gillespie is one such resident, as they are called. She is an “empty-nester” who spent well over. A decade as a teaching assistant in the St. Louis Public Schools. She is now a teaching resident at Patrick Henry Downtown Academy. She’s working in the same school system that educated her kids, and a generation earlier, her.