TM Landry College Preparatory Academy claimed a 100 percent graduation and college acceptance rate. It sent students to Harvard, Stanford, and other elite institutions. Michelle Obama praised it. Ellen DeGeneres featured its students on national television. More than 18 million people watched viral videos of students opening Ivy League acceptance emails.
It was, according to a new book titled Miracle Children (via MSN), built on fabricated transcripts, inflated grades, and the physical and psychological abuse of the very children it claimed to champion.
The school, founded in 2005 in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana — a small town ten miles east of Lafayette with a poverty rate twice the national figure — operated unaccredited and unregulated for years. Mike Landry was never charged. The FBI investigated in 2019 and shelved its inquiry. And the Landrys have since disappeared.
Mike Landry and his wife, Tracey, opened the school to homeschool five children and their own. Landry, a University of Louisiana at Lafayette graduate with a business degree and military background, pitched the academy as a place of advocacy for young black children. He charged $600 a month in tuition. By January 2017, enrollment had reached 142 students.
The appeal was real. Louisiana's education landscape gave parents every reason to look elsewhere. Only half of the state's secondary students learned from qualified teachers. More than one in four adult residents was illiterate. Landry positioned himself as the alternative — described as captivating and flamboyant, clad in bright colors, radiating the promise that black children from forgotten towns could reach the most elite institutions in the country.
The school's first Harvard acceptance came in December 2015. The video went viral. The media machine followed. In 2018, students Alex Little and Ayrton Little appeared on the Ellen DeGeneres show after being accepted to Stanford and Harvard, respectively. Ellen told her audience the Little family frequently faced homelessness, spent winters without heat, and rarely knew if there would be food on the table.
Their mother, Maureen Little, was a trained chef who ran a catering business, taught cooking classes, drove an SUV, and had found a new full-time job at a vocational college. She had put the boys through private schools before sending them to Landry just the year before the Ellen appearance. The narrative Ellen sold and the reality didn't quite align — but by then, the myth was already set in stone.
Mary Mitchell heard about TM Landry in 2016. She and her husband, Allen, ran the local gas station. She enrolled her son Nyjal, then 14, and her daughter, then 10.
Nyjal, now 23, explained why the school drew him in:
"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."
He respected the vision. He said so plainly:
"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."
In January 2018, Nyjal told his mother that Landry had repeatedly beaten him — placing him in a chokehold from behind, forcing him to the floor, dragging him across concrete by his hoodie, and insisting he kneel before the class. He said Landry had previously slapped and shoved him, pinning him to a door.
Students alleged Landry's methods were brutal, humiliating, and belittling, with pupils shoved, slapped, and forced to kneel for hours. He allegedly doctored students' personal essays, inventing clubs and teams that didn't exist. He allegedly terrorized students, playing them off against each other, warning that challenging him meant no college acceptance.
When parents confronted him, Landry angrily told them that if they didn't like his methods, they could leave.
Mary Mitchell took her son's claims to the police. Landry was questioned. He told police and other parents that Nyjal was lying and that the Mitchells had invented their claims to extort him. The police believed Landry. Other pupils denied seeing the attacks.
The Mitchell family was ostracized. Nyjal and his sister were branded traitors. Mary described what it did to her children:
"It destroyed them. 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."
Mary pulled both children from the school. Both sank into deep depression. The experience drove Mary to a breaking point — she followed Landry to a Walmart parking lot with the intention of running him down, then broke down in tears in her car when she recognized the insanity of the thought.
It wasn't until November 2018 that the New York Times published its own account of the school. The Breaux Bridge police then received about ten complaints involving the school in the month that followed. Enrollment fell to around 60 students by 2019. The school closed in 2022.
Mary Mitchell had been telling the truth for nearly a year before anyone listened.
The damage didn't end when the school closed. It followed the students who believed TM Landry had prepared them for the institutions it placed them in.
Nyjal Mitchell had to redo a grade. He has been in therapy since the alleged abuse. But he 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. He wants to train as a counselor.
"I feel like I got off really lucky out of that situation. 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."
Mike Landry was never charged. The FBI opened an investigation in 2019 and quietly shelved it. No charges were ever filed. Mike and Tracey Landry left town after the school closed and have not been seen or heard from since. Landry could not be reached for comment.
The school operated in a regulatory void — unaccredited and unregulated under a framework dating to the 1970s, when some Louisiana schools successfully sought permission to avoid desegregation restrictions. That loophole, originally carved out for a very different purpose, gave Landry the legal cover to operate without oversight for nearly two decades.
Mary Mitchell's assessment of what should change is difficult to argue with:
"Even home schools need to be regulated by someone. 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?"
This is a case that should force an uncomfortable conversation — not about whether school choice works, but about what happens when the institutions meant to validate education simply don't exist. Elite universities accepted students with fabricated transcripts. The media amplified an unverified feel-good story without asking basic questions. A first lady lent her credibility to a school no one had bothered to audit. Law enforcement dismissed the mother's account and believed the accused.
Every institution that should have caught this — from the local police to the Ivy League admissions offices to the FBI — either looked the other way or showed up too late.
Nyjal Mitchell sees it clearly:
"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."
The viral videos got 18 million views. The feel-good story got the talk show appearances and the praise from the First Lady. The children who were beaten, lied to, and sent to universities they weren't prepared for got therapy bills and dropped credits. Mike Landry got to vanish.
