School known for getting underprivileged kids into Ivy League colleges is accused of physical abuse and falsifying transcripts
Viral videos from a Louisiana school showing students opening acceptance letters from Ivy League colleges could be fake.
A new exposé from the New York Times reveals that the unaccredited T.M. Landry College Preparatory School’s administrators and founders, Michael and Tracey Landry, allegedly falsified transcripts and abused students physically and emotionally.
To investigate the school, Times reporters interviewed 46 people: parents of former Landry students, current and former students, former teachers, and law enforcement agents. They also looked at student records and at police and court documents. One document showed that Michael and another teacher had pleaded guilty to crimes “related to violence against students.” Documents also referred to multiple witness statements saying that Michael hit children.
When interviewed by the paper, he admitted that he hit students and “could be rough.” “Oh, I yell a lot,” he said. He also admitted to having black and white students compete against one another “because that is how the real world works.”
However, Michael told the Times of his physically aggressive tactics, “I don’t do that anymore.” Students interviewed disagreed. The article claims that students and teachers feel he and Tracey “fostered a culture of fear with physical and emotional abuse.” The article states that “students were forced to kneel on rice, rocks and hot pavement, and were choked, yelled at and berated.”
Tyler Sassau, a T.M. Landry student, said he was forced to kneel on a bathroom floor for nearly two hours last year.
More than a half-dozen students interviewed for this story said they had witnessed Michael choking classmates, and three students observed him “slam others on desks.” Three other students said they saw him put a student with autism in a closet.
Nyjal Mitchell, 16, was determined to make it at T.M. Landry because of his dream attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Believing this alternative school was his ticket in, he put up with Michael’s abuse, which included choking, shoving and dragging. Mitchell also saw Michael abuse other students, so he and his parents filed complaints against the administrator in February 2017.
While he doesn’t deny his physical method of teaching, Michael will not cop to falsifying transcripts.
Bryson Sassau was accepted to St. John’s University based on such accomplishments as overcoming an abusive and neglectful father, four years of honors English, becoming a baseball MVP and earning high honors in the “Mathematics Olympiad.” Yet the student says none of this was true. “I was just a small piece in a whole fathom of lies,” he told the Times. He was furious with what he saw on his application, which he hadn’t seen until this investigation because the Landrys submitted it for him.
Another student, Raymond Smith Jr., who graduated from T.M. Landry in 2017 and went on to NYU, said the same. Michael reportedly forced him to “exaggerate his father’s absence from his life on his NYU application.”
Yet another student, Megan Malveaux, 16, thinks she received a “mediocre” transcript from T.M. Landry because she left the school before graduating.
None of the parents interviewed had seen their child’s college applications.
Twenty current and former students and one former teacher interviewed by the Times said that Michael threatened to “ruin” students’ futures if they left the school or told anyone what happened there. If they were loyal, pupils got glowing transcripts that included “high marks in advanced coursework they never took.”
Michael gave them other reasons to abide by his rules. He convinced kids that he had special relationships with college deans at universities, particularly Harvard, and that he could “use them to help students get into college — or to keep them out.” He also warned students that colleges could observe them through the school’s security cameras.
Harvard, Dartmouth, Stanford, St. John’s, Wesleyan, Cornell and NYU denied any “special relationship” with the T.M. Landry School and said the “claims of observing the school through security cameras were absurd.”
Why would anyone believe these claims in the first place? “He got us on the unity,” said Letarchia Lewis, a parent. She felt he capitalized on “a disadvantage that you know we are all a part of.”
It seems the Landrys told people what they wanted to hear. Black parents believed the Landrys’ claim that they could give the children success “in a world that often believed they were only capable of being sports stars.”
“Society kept saying all these negative things about us because it was just easy to beat this broken-down school,” Michael said in defense.
The couple point to their students’ high ACT scores and high graduation and college enrollment statistics. “When you see these videos, you want that,” Lewis said, referring to their viral videos of students being accepted to schools such as Cornell.
“That dream you see on television, all those videos,” said Sassau’s mother, Alison St. Julien, “it’s really a nightmare.”
In fact, T.M. Landry graduates have had “mixed success” in college. Of the students interviewed, many had to withdraw from college because they never really got an education.
At the T.M. Landry College Preparatory School, classes are optional, and while teachers (often the Landrys, parents or, in one case, another apparently abusive adult) are on hand, students teach each other, according to the article. Students said that much of the school day — which bled into night — was focused on the ACT, which they would take over and over again.
Eight parents interviewed for this article had their children assessed, and of the 11 students tested, only two were performing at grade level. The rest had fallen behind or made no progress.
Students have been left feeling brainwashed, abused and scarred, while parents are racked with guilt.
Despite all this, and more disturbing information uncovered by this article, the Landrys just announced that they would open another school.
Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:
Teacher caught on video abusing students to be investigated, moved to another school
School employees fired for allegedly mocking a 12-year-old autistic student
Teacher’s bathroom note to students sparks outrage: ‘That borders on cruel and inhumane’
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