Cortex District Member Per Scholas St. Louis is Bullish on Tech Training in the AI Era

There’s at least one worrywart in every learner cohort at Per Scholas St. Louis, the no-cost tech-training nonprofit at Cortex. So say the instructors of the most recent IT Support course. It had 13 students, and the worrywart among them, the instructors say, was 27-year-old Jonai “Serenity” Whitehorn. 

She had grown up in Florissant. She remembers, as a kid, watching her tech-savvy dad take apart his desktop computer and thinking to herself, I want that. She begged for her own PC, which she got at age 12, and became a “huge nerd.” She went straight from high school into tech internships and learned by doing, but she craved more foundational knowledge and higher-paying work, and so found her way to Per Scholas. She enrolled in its 15-week tech-support course. It was “very intense,” she says—so intense that she even opted into some free counseling provided by the nonprofit, just to get through it. But get through it she did. At the graduation ceremony on Feb. 27, instructor Zell Davis says that he appreciates worrywarts: Their discomfort drives them to be successful. “I’m looking very forward to seeing what she’s able to do,” he says.