Jada Pinkett Smith is adding another title to her resume: schoolmaster. The 37-year-old actress-producer-musician and her husband, Will Smith, opened the New Village Leadership Academy in Calabasas, California last fall. The private school is for pre-kindergarten through sixth grade. It currently has 60 students.
Jada said she decided to open the elementary school after creating a home-school program for her children, 10-year-old Jaden and 8-year-old Willow.
"More and more parents were like, 'Can we come?'" she said. "Then my house started to fill up. We had like 20 kids and I said, 'We might as well start a school.'"
The New Village Leadership Academy generated some controversy when it was first announced because it relies on instructional methods developed by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. But the school's director has said it isn't a Scientology facility. The school’s Web site states that Hubbard's "study technology" is a secular course akin to a Montessori approach.
Jada Pinkett Smith said the school stresses "100 percent mastery," encouraging students to retake exams until they score 100 percent. The student body is ethnically and economically diverse. She said that this is probably the hardest thing that she has ever done, but that it is really rewarding. She also plans to open a companion campus for upper grades
Jada is also set to star in a new television series, "HawthoRNe," premièring in June on TNT. She plays a widowed nurse struggling to overcome her grief while balancing her duties at the hospital with and being a single mom of a teenage daughter.
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