Report: School praised by Michelle Obama exposed as a scam
When Mary Mitchell heard about the TM Landry College Preparatory Academy it seemed like the answers to her prayers.
It was 2016, and she and her husband were living in Louisiana. Only half of the state's secondary students learned from qualified teachers, more than one in four adult residents were illiterate and the public school system ranked among the worst in the nation.
Worse, the Mitchells' town of Breaux Bridge, ten miles east of Lafayette, was a deprived district in an already struggling corner of America with a poverty rate twice the nationwide figure.
The Mitchells wanted something better for their then-14-year-old son Nyjal and his ten-year-old sister who were, they felt, being failed by the system.
Into this scene stepped Mike Landry and his wife, Tracey, with their school and their promises. Their students, they said, were largely black and overcame grinding poverty and appalling odds to make it into Ivy League schools.
Mike and Tracey Landry, seen with Jessica Marinaccio the dean of undergraduate admissions and financial aid for Columbia University in June 2015, also wooed college admissions tutors.
From Viral Success Story to Alleged Fraud
In fact, their publicity boasted, they had a 100 percent graduation and college acceptance rate. In December 2015, the school had their first Harvard acceptance - a moment captured by Landry and uploaded to social media, where it went viral.
Indeed, the success was eye-catching, public figures took note.
First Lady Michelle Obama praised the Landrys' efforts, and talk show host Ellen DeGeneres invited their students onto her program. Landry was lauded as a savior, his students nothing short of 'miracles.'
If this all sounds too good to be true it's because it was.
As details revealed in a new book Miracle Children, the school was reportedly a sham. Grades were inflated, transcripts were faked and physical and mental abuse ran rife.
For Mitchell, the book's release is a vindication of sorts. She was one of the first to blow the whistle on the Landrys and in return she, and her son who alleged the Landrys had beaten him, were disbelieved and shunned.
Behind the Ivy League Promise
In an exclusive interview with the Daily Mail, Mitchell has shared her own devastating experience with TM Landry College Prep and the toll she says it took on her children.
Speaking from her home in Louisiana she said: 'I believe that Mike is evil. Evil, because I don't think that a sane, rational human being would do what he has done to that number of children without any conscience.'
It began, as so many stories do, full of promise, as the Mitchells, and many other aspirational families, were drawn in by the school's tales of Ivy League success.
Her son was keen, too.
He told the Daily Mail: 'I had been put in a public school and was having a lot of experiences with bullying from my black peers, because I was a nerdy black kid in a poor, less-educated part of America.
An Unregulated School Born of Historical Loopholes
'The Landry aura of knowledge appealed to me. Mike was an intelligent-seeming black man who wanted other black people to be successful in places that they were not allowed into. He had a vision that I respected, and I still can say to this day that I respect the vision of wanting black people to succeed, or wanting black people to be in these Ivy Leagues, these places that they're deserving to be in.'
Born in Breaux Bridge, Landry had graduated from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette with a degree in business, joined the military, then returned home to marry Tracey, a nurse who grew up across the road from him.
They opened their school in 2005, initially to homeschool five children and their own.
It was unaccredited and unregulated - a legacy from the 1970s, when some Louisiana schools successfully sought permission to swerve desegregation restrictions.
Colleges will usually ask students from unaccredited schools to take additional tests to confirm results: the Landrys, the book alleges, did not inform the colleges of their status and the colleges did not ask.
Landry, pictured with wife Tracey on the Today show in 2018.
High Hopes in a Low-Income Community
Landry pitched his school as a place of advocacy for young black children. Captivating and flamboyant, clad in bright colors, Mitchell said he told parents his teaching was unconventional and tough, but effective.
Landry also wooed college admissions tutors, who were sucked in by his spiel about championing disadvantaged youth. Parents scraped together the $600 a month he charged for tuition - a fraction of the amount charged by many Ivy League feeder schools, but a fortune in Breaux Bridge.
Word quickly spread, and by January 2017 there were 142 pupils. Mike and Tracey Landry were basking in their success: locals told the authors of Miracle Children that his flashy clothes were now designer, and she had traded her Michael Kors purses for Louis Vuitton and Gucci, with coordinated stilettos.
In January 2018 Nyjal told his mother that Landry had repeatedly beaten him, culminating in an episode that month in which Landry placed him in a chokehold from behind, forced him to the floor, then dragged him across the concrete by his hoodie before insisting he kneel before the shocked class.
TM Landry College in Breaux Bridge was founded in the Landry's home in 2005, then moved to this larger site on the outskirts of the Louisiana town in 2017.
Abuse Allegations Dismissed as Lies
Nyjal said that Landry had previously slapped and shoved him, pinning him to a door. The Mitchells took their son's claims to the police – Landry was questioned but told officers and other parents that the boy was lying and that the couple had invented the claims of abuse to extort him.
Other pupils denied seeing the attacks; the police believed Landry; and the Mitchells, who ran the local gas station, were ostracized.
Nyjal and his sister were shunned for speaking ill of the school and its domineering head.
When she pulled Nyjal and his sister out of the school the youngsters were branded 'traitors,' and both sank into a deep depression.
'It destroyed them,' Mitchell said. 'As teenagers, you put your whole world into who you think your friends are, and then those people now hate you, saying that you're a traitor, and you turned on this man that's next to God in their world.'
So white hot was Mary Mitchell's anger that she followed Landry to a Walmart with the intention of running him down in the parking lot. Realizing the insanity of the thought, she broke down in tears behind the wheel of her car.
Alex Little (left) and his brother Ayrton (right) were invited onto the Ellen DeGeneres show in 2018.
National Praise Meets a More Complicated Reality
That same month two pupils were invited onto the Ellen DeGeneres show: Alex Little, accepted to Stanford, and Ayrton Little, off to Harvard. More than 18 million people had watched the videos of them receiving their acceptance emails.
But when DeGeneres began discussing their college applications, and the tough family life described, folks back in Breaux Bridge had questions.
Maureen Little, the teenagers' mother, had indeed raised the boys alone and struggled financially. Their home was dilapidated, and they had to heat water on the stove for a bath.
But Maureen managed to put the boys through private schools until she lost her job and sent the boys to Landry just the year before. A trained chef who ran a catering business, taught cooking classes, and drove an SUV, she soon found a new full-time job at a vocational college.
Ellen, however, told her audiences that the family frequently faced homelessness, and spent the winters without heat. She said they rarely knew if there would be food on the dinner table.
The exposure was the beginning of the end for the Landrys.
Independent Testing Exposes Academic Gaps
In 2017, one student's parent, Adam Broussard, sent his son Collin for independent testing and was stunned to learn that he had first grade reading skills in his second month of third grade. Collin left the school in the spring of 2018.
After the Ellen debacle, the Broussards spoke out, urging other parents to get their children independently tested.
The parents organized a meeting and confronted Mike Landry, who angrily told them that if they didn't like his teaching methods they could leave.
Instead, the concerned families contacted a lawyer and tipped off the New York Times, which in November 2018 published a devastating account of the school.
The Times reported that students spent all day watching online lessons, and cramming for their tests rather than being educated. Landry would reportedly doctor their personal essays, inventing clubs they attended and teams they played on.
According to the New York Times, Landry would terrorize the students, playing them off against each other and warning that if they challenged him they would not be accepted to college.
His methods, students alleged, were brutal, humiliating and belittling, with pupils shoved, slapped, and forced to kneel for hours.
The Breaux Bridge police received about ten complaints involving the school in the month following The New York Times publishing its article, The Lafayette Daily Advertiser reported.
The FBI began investigating in 2019 but shelved its inquiry with no charges ever filed. Enrollment, however, fell to around 60 students that year, and in 2022 the school closed.
Mike and Tracey Landry left town and have not been seen or heard from since.
Pictured: Nyjal Mitchell.
The Long Shadow Left by a Collapsed School
The devastation they left in their wake, however, remained.
The book chronicles the fates of several former students. Ayrton and Alex Little graduated, but others did not. One student, Asja Jackson, dropped out of Wesleyan after two months, deeply depressed with her failure to grasp the demanding science lessons.
Another, Raymond Smith, graduated from Landry in 2017 but only spent a year at New York University, dropping out when he realized the financial aid Landry assured him would be coming was a lie.
Nyjal, now 23, graduated from the University of Louisiana in May 2025 with a degree in psychology, and is now studying for his master's at Southern University in Baton Rouge. Having been in therapy since Landry's alleged abuse he now wants to train as a counsellor himself.
'I feel like I got off really lucky out of that situation,' he said. 'The trauma is one thing, but the reality of this situation is I was able to speak on something that needed to be stopped. And, you know, I left Landry and got to keep going to high school. It sucked to have to redo a grade, but at least I made it to college on my own. Others paid probably tens of thousands of dollars, and they didn't even get a high school diploma.'
He said: 'It was completely possible for TM Landry to be an amazing place that did amazing things. But he was using the backs of black children and other children to prop himself up, to prop his organization up.'
Nyjal Mitchell, center, with his mother Mary (to his right), his sister, and father Allen (far right).
Justice Hoped For, but a Life Moved Forward
The book, Nyjal said, has given him 'closure,' while the years of work processing the trauma have given him a remarkable equanimity.
'I hope that Mike gets what's coming to him, the justice that's coming to him,' he said. 'But I have moved on to a completely different part of my life. I've learned from my therapist over the years that you give energy to the things that you need to. That's just not him.'
Both Nyjal and his mother agree, though, that Louisiana needs to step up its educational oversight.
'Even home schools need to be regulated by someone,' she said. 'And if they're going to be in the presence of children, they need to pass background checks. There should be some oversight yearly, at least, where someone comes in and verifies that nothing is happening to these kids, right?'
Landry could not be reached for comment. He was never charged in connection with any of the allegations made by Mitchell or the authors.
