TM Landry College Preparatory Academy claimed a 100 percent graduation and college acceptance rate. It boasted Ivy League placements, viral videos watched by millions, and praise from Ellen DeGeneres and First Lady Michelle Obama. A new book, Miracle Children, now details what was allegedly happening behind the curtain: inflated grades, fabricated transcripts, and physical abuse of the very children the school promised to save.

According to the Daily Mail, the school wasn't accredited. It wasn't regulated. And its charismatic founder, Mike Landry, has vanished — never charged, never held to account, and unreachable for comment.

The Vision That Seduced a Community

Mike Landry and his wife Tracey opened TM Landry in 2005 in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana — a small town ten miles east of Lafayette with a poverty rate twice the national average. The school began as a homeschool operation for five children and the Landrys' own. Mike Landry, a University of Louisiana at Lafayette graduate with a business degree and military background, told parents his teaching methods were unconventional and tough — but effective. Tuition ran $600 a month.

The pitch landed in a community that needed it. The region's educational landscape was bleak. And Landry, described as captivating and flamboyant, clad in bright colors, offered something that looked like a way out.

In December 2015, the school secured its first Harvard acceptance. The video went viral. By January 2017, enrollment hit 142 students. That same month, brothers Alex and Ayrton Little — accepted to Stanford and Harvard, respectively — appeared on the Ellen DeGeneres show. Ellen told her audience the family frequently faced homelessness, spent winters without heat, and rarely knew if there would be food on the dinner table. More than 18 million people watched the acceptance videos.

Michelle Obama praised the Landrys' efforts. Columbia University's dean of undergraduate admissions, Jessica Marinaccio, was photographed with Mike and Tracey Landry in June 2015. The school moved to a larger site on the outskirts of Breaux Bridge in 2017. The American dream factory was in full production.

Except the product was allegedly counterfeit.

What Was Actually Happening Inside

Mary Mitchell, a Breaux Bridge mother who co-ran the local gas station with her husband Allen, enrolled her two children at TM Landry in 2016 — her son Nyjal, then 14, and his ten-year-old sister. The school's reputation had reached her, and the promise of academic excellence for her kids was irresistible.

In January 2018, Nyjal told his mother that Landry had repeatedly abused him. The allegations were specific: a chokehold from behind, being forced to the floor, dragged across concrete by his hoodie, and made to kneel before the class. He alleged Landry had previously slapped and shoved him and pinned him to a door.

The Mitchells took their son's claims to the police. Officers questioned Landry, who told them the boy was lying and that the Mitchells had invented the claims to extort him. The police believed Landry. Other pupils denied seeing the attacks.

The Mitchells were ostracized. Mary pulled both children from the school. Both were branded traitors. Both sank into deep depression. Mary Mitchell described the fallout in an exclusive interview with the Daily Mail:

"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."

The book Miracle Children alleges the abuse extended well beyond the Mitchells' experience. Students alleged being shoved, slapped, and forced to kneel for hours. Landry allegedly terrorized students, played them against each other, and warned that challenging him would prevent college acceptance. When concerned parents confronted him, he angrily told them that if they didn't like his methods, they could leave.

The Transcripts Were a Fiction

The academic fraud ran parallel to the alleged abuse. Landry reportedly doctored personal essays, inventing clubs and teams that didn't exist. The book alleges colleges never asked about the school's accreditation status.

Adam Broussard sent his son Collin for independent testing in 2017. The result: Collin had first-grade reading skills in his second month of third grade. He left the school in the spring of 2018.

The students who made it to elite universities on TM Landry's fabricated credentials didn't all survive the landing. Former student Asja Jackson dropped out of Wesleyan after just two months, deeply depressed and unable to grasp the demanding science coursework. Raymond Smith graduated from Landry in 2017 and enrolled at New York University — but spent only a year there before dropping out when he realized the financial aid Landry had assured him would be coming was a lie.

These weren't kids who failed. They were kids who were set up to fail — sent into elite academic environments with fraudulent preparation and hollow promises.

A Regulatory Vacuum That Made It All Possible

TM Landry operated as an unaccredited, unregulated institution. This wasn't an oversight — it was a feature of Louisiana's educational landscape, a legacy from the 1970s when some schools successfully sought permission to avoid desegregation restrictions. That loophole, born of one era's bad faith, enabled another's.

No one checked the transcripts. No one verified that actual education was taking place. No one ran a background check on who was in the room with these children. Mary Mitchell made the point plainly:

"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?"

The institutions that celebrated TM Landry — the talk shows, the universities, the public figures — never asked the basic questions either. A school with no accreditation was placing students at Harvard and Stanford, and the admissions offices apparently never raised an eyebrow. The media amplified the narrative without scrutiny. Everyone wanted the story to be true, so no one checked whether it was.

The Reckoning That Wasn't

In the spring of 2018, the Broussards spoke out. Parents organized and confronted Mike Landry. Concerned families contacted a lawyer and tipped off the New York Times, which published its account in November 2018. The Breaux Bridge police received about ten complaints in the month that followed, according to The Lafayette Daily Advertiser.

The FBI began investigating in 2019. Enrollment dropped to around 60 students. Then — nothing. The FBI shelved its inquiry. No charges were ever filed. The school limped along until it closed in 2022, and Mike and Tracey Landry simply left town. Locals told the book's authors that Tracey had traded Michael Kors purses for Louis Vuitton and Gucci with coordinated stilettos. Then they disappeared.

Mike Landry was never charged in connection with any of the allegations.

Let that sink in. A man accused of systematic physical abuse of children, of fabricating academic records to defraud elite universities, of running what amounted to an educational con operation for nearly two decades — walked away clean.

The Real Cost

Nyjal Mitchell is now 23. He graduated from the University of Louisiana in May 2025 with a degree in psychology and is studying for his master's at Southern University in Baton Rouge. He wants to train as a counselor. He's been in therapy since the alleged abuse.

He doesn't carry bitterness — or at least he's learned to set it down. But he's clear-eyed about what happened:

"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."

He also understands that he got off easier than most:

"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."

That's the part of this story that should disturb every parent, every education official, and every public figure who lent their name to TM Landry without doing basic due diligence. The children who were paraded in front of cameras and celebrated as proof of a miracle were, according to these allegations, being exploited. Their achievements were manufactured. Their suffering was real.

Mary Mitchell's assessment of the man at the center of it all is unsparing:

"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."

The celebrities moved on. The universities kept their good press. The FBI closed the file. And somewhere, Mike Landry is living free — his students left holding transcripts that weren't worth the paper they were printed on.