[URL][URL]https://www.google.com/am...m-landry-college-prep-black-students.amp.html[/URL][/URL]
The main student in this article is a St. John’s student.
Louisiana School Made Headlines for Sending Black Kids to Elite Colleges. Here’s the Reality.
T.M. Landry, a school in small-town Louisiana, has garnered national attention for vaulting its underprivileged black students to elite colleges. But the school cut corners and doctored college applications.
Nov. 30, 2018
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Advertising helps fund Times journalism.
Former T.M. Landry students, clockwise from top left: Bryson Sassau, Liana Williams, Dawson Lewis, Avery Lewis, Ana Howard, Nyjal Mitchell, Domanick Williams, Laila Viltz, Megan Malveaux and Anthony Edmond.Annie Flanagan for The New York Times
Former T.M. Landry students, clockwise from top left: Bryson Sassau, Liana Williams, Dawson Lewis, Avery Lewis, Ana Howard, Nyjal Mitchell, Domanick Williams, Laila Viltz, Megan Malveaux and Anthony Edmond.Annie Flanagan for The New York Times
BREAUX BRIDGE, La. — Bryson Sassau’s application would inspire any college admissions officer.
A founder of T.M. Landry College Preparatory School described him as a “bright, energetic, compassionate and genuinely well-rounded” student whose alcoholic father had beaten him and his mother and had denied them money for food and shelter. His transcript “speaks for itself,” the founder, Tracey Landry, wrote, but Mr. Sassau should also be lauded for founding a community service program, the Dry House, to help the children of abusive and alcoholic parents. He took four years of honors English, the application said, was a baseball M.V.P. and earned high honors in the “Mathematics Olympiad.”
The narrative earned Mr. Sassau acceptance to St. John’s University in New York. There was one problem: None of it was true.
“I was just a small piece in a whole fathom of lies,” Mr. Sassau said.
T.M. Landry has become a viral Cinderella story, a small school run by Michael Landry, a teacher and former salesman, and his wife, Ms. Landry, a nurse, whose predominantly black, working-class students have escaped the rural South for the nation’s most elite colleges. A video of a 16-year-old student opening his Harvard acceptance letter last year has been viewed more than eight million times. Other Landry students went on to Yale, Brown, Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, Dartmouth, Cornell and Wesleyan.
Landry success stories have been splashed in the past two years on the “Today” show, “Ellen” and the “CBS This Morning.” Education professionals extol T.M. Landry and its 100 or so kindergarten-through-12th-grade students as an example for other Louisiana schools. Wealthy supporters have pushed the Landrys, who have little educational training, to expand to other cities. Small donors, heartened by the web videos, send in a steady stream of cash.
T.M. Landry College Prep, a small private school in Louisiana, boasted about its record of sending black students from working-class families to top universities. But there’s more to the story.Nov. 30, 2018
In reality, the school falsified transcripts, made up student accomplishments and mined the worst stereotypes of black America to manufacture up-from-hardship tales that it sold to Ivy League schools hungry for diversity. The Landrys also fostered a culture of fear with physical and emotional abuse, students and teachers said. Students were forced to kneel on rice, rocks and hot pavement, and were choked, yelled at and berated.
The Landrys’ deception has tainted nearly everyone the school has touched, including students, parents and college admissions officers convinced of a myth.
The colleges “want to be able to get behind the black kids going off and succeeding, and going to all of these schools,” said Raymond Smith Jr., who graduated from T.M. Landry in 2017 and enrolled at N.Y.U. He said that Mr. Landry forced him to exaggerate his father’s absence from his life on his N.Y.U. application.
“It’s a good look,” these colleges “getting these bright, high-flying, came-from-nothing-turned-into-something students,” Mr. Smith said.
This portrait of T.M. Landry emerged from interviews with 46 people: parents of former Landry students; current and former students; former teachers; and law enforcement agents. The New York Times also examined student records and court documents showing that Mr. Landry and another teacher at the school had pleaded guilty to crimes related to violence against students, and police records that included multiple witness statements saying that Mr. Landry hit children. The Breaux Bridge Police Department closed the case after deciding it was outside of its jurisdiction.
“That dream you see on television, all those videos,” said Mr. Sassau’s mother, Alison St. Julien, “it’s really a nightmare.”
In an interview with The Times, the Landrys denied falsifying transcripts and college applications, but Mr. Landry admitted that he hit students and could be rough. “Oh, I yell a lot,” he said. He goads black and white students to compete against one another because that is how the real world works, he said.
In 2013, Mr. Landry was sentenced to probation and attended an anger management program after pleading guilty to a count of battery. Despite the documentation, he insisted that he did not plead guilty or serve probation. Mr. Landry said that the victim was a student whose mother asked him to hit her child, and he said he had eased up on physical punishments.
“I don’t do that anymore,” he said.
A court document recording minutes from the sentencing hearing of Michael Landry’s battery case.
A court document recording minutes from the sentencing hearing of Michael Landry’s battery case.
Instead, he calls himself a “drill sergeant” or “coach,” and asks children to kneel before him to learn humility, for five minutes at most, Mr. Landry said.
That is not how the students have experienced it. Tyler Sassau, Mr. Sassau’s brother, said he can still feel the humiliation and smell the stench on his clothes from kneeling last year on a bathroom floor for nearly two hours.
“I wasn’t going to get up without asking him because if I did, I could’ve got something worse,” he said. “I could barely stand when I got up.”
In their defense, the Landrys touted the school’s ACT scores and high graduation and college enrollment statistics.
“We get pushed under the microscope, or under the dagger,” Mr. Landry said, because “it had been just black kids going. Society kept saying all these negative things about us because it was just easy to beat this broken-down school.”
Bryson Sassau, left, with his brother, Tyler, at their home in Lafayette, La.Annie Flanagan for The New York Times
Bryson Sassau, left, with his brother, Tyler, at their home in Lafayette, La.Annie Flanagan for The New York Times
The students who navigated the Landrys’ system and made it to the nation’s top colleges now face their own quandaries.
“I really believe that we all thought we were doing the right thing at the time, and didn’t have a choice,” Mr. Smith said. “It was a cultish mentality.”
T.M. Landry produced its first graduating class in 2013, and since then, 50 students have graduated, according to the school’s promotional materials. They have had mixed success in college.
Some alumni, especially those who spent only a short time at T.M. Landry, have been successful. Bryson Sassau did well in his classes at St. John’s, although he had to quit some advanced science and math courses. Mr. Smith also did well, but with debts mounting had to drop out after his freshman year. Another Landry graduate said he feels at home at Brown in his junior year, has maintained good grades and was recently accepted into a program that prepares students to pursue a doctoral degree.
The student in the most viral video, who spent only a short time at Landry, is in his first semester at Harvard. Other Landry students have been admitted to Harvard over the past three years, but the university declined to provide information on their status.
For yet other Landry students, particularly those who spent multiple years at the school, the results after graduation have been disappointing. Some have withdrawn from college, or transferred to less rigorous programs.
Asja Jackson, whose Wesleyan University acceptance video also went viral, decided to leave this month after she said she fell into a depression over her first-semester struggles. She said she “froze and failed” her first chemistry tests and walked out of a biology exam. Her papers, she said, were “childish,” and she was too embarrassed to attend a writing workshop.
She studied and worked through the night, like she had done at T.M. Landry since eighth grade, but she just was not “catching it,” she said. She said she eventually stopped eating, talking to her friends, leaving her room or going to class.
“I didn’t understand why people around me were doing well, and I wasn’t,” said Ms. Jackson, who took the advice of her dean and started medical leave. “I couldn’t tell my friends because they would say, ‘How did you get into the school then?’ There were too many questions that I couldn’t answer.”
At least five T.M. Landry families spoke with local law enforcement, and two more contacted the local education authorities for aid, but little changed.
Ashlee McFarlane, a lawyer at Gerger Khalil & Hennessy in Houston, said dozens of parents, students and staff have left the school and are reaching out to her for help.
“Above all,” Ms. McFarlane said, “they want to protect their children and to finally be heard.”
“He got us on the unity.”
Mr. Landry, 49, and Ms. Landry, 50, say that education lifted them from their impoverished childhoods in Breaux Bridge, near Lafayette. Ms. Landry got a nursing degree. Mr. Landry got his bachelor’s degree from the University of Southwestern Louisiana, which was later renamed the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He was a salesman and, from 2002 through 2004, a certified teacher.
The couple started T.M. Landry in 2005 as a home-school for their son and five children. The early results were not good. Two of the six students ended up in prison, Mr. Landry said. But the couple continued to recruit students from area churches, telling parishioners that teaching was their calling.
Michael and Tracey Landry holding a letter from Harvard University, in an image that was posted to T.M. Landry’s Facebook page.
Michael and Tracey Landry holding a letter from Harvard University, in an image that was posted to T.M. Landry’s Facebook page.
T.M. Landry, now an unaccredited private school, settled last year into a bare-bones factory building that Mr. Landry has compared to his students: abandoned and run down, but loved by him.
By taking no government funding, the school falls into a narrow category of educational institutions that the state does not regulate or approve, said Erin Bendily, the assistant superintendent of policy and governmental affairs at the Louisiana Department of Education. Some T.M. Landry diplomas say that students meet Louisiana state requirements, but the state does not recognize the diplomas.
“So what, we’re not accredited,” Mr. Landry said at a recruiting event this year. “Three years in a row, Harvard took us. Stanford has taken us.”
Mr. Landry said he does not participate in state scholarship programs or accept any other funding because it would impair his ability to run the school in a “nontraditional” way.
Over the years, Mr. Landry has appealed to parents whose children were struggling, bored or ignored in their public and private schools. He told them that his school had special programs for students with disabilities. Parents said he took a deep interest in their lives, called their children “baby girl” and “baby boy,” and shared personal stories about his own family members who had struggles with drugs or had been in prison.
Mr. Landry used to tout the school as created for “black troublemakers.” As it became more prominent, it started to appeal to local doctors, paralegals and small-business owners. Some white and Asian families also enrolled their children.
Black families thought that the Landrys were fighting to give their children a fair shot in a world that often believed they were only capable of being sports stars. Mr. Landry’s mantra: “Why play for a team when you can own the team?”
“The fact that he was black, I was like, ‘Man, he’s going to uplift these kids,’” said Doresa Barton, whose three children were enrolled at Landry until this year.
“He got us on the unity,” said Letarchia Lewis, a parent, and he capitalized on “a disadvantage that you know we are all a part of.”
Letarchia Lewis with her sons, Dawson, right, and Avery. Annie Flanagan for The New York Times
Letarchia Lewis with her sons, Dawson, right, and Avery. Annie Flanagan for The New York Times
The students cleaned the school, taught younger children, stayed into the night and attended year-round. Nearly every day they would call and respond “I love you” in several languages, and Mr. Landry said the word “kneel” meant “I love you” in his own language, “Mike-a-nese.”
Parents said that they were told to feed and clothe their children — and that Mr. Landry would take care of the rest. Apprehensive families were placated by videos of students solving tough math problems and being accepted to college. “When you see these videos,” Ms. Lewis said, “you want that.”
After each viral video and media appearance, donors including wealthy executives and older Americans on fixed incomes sent money. T.M. Landry took in more than $250,000 in donations this year, a portion of which was earmarked by the donors for tuition assistance, according to records of the donations obtained by The Times.
But the school has not yet offered any scholarships, said Greg Davis, a T.M. Landry board member. Mr. Landry said donations were put into a general account, but he declined to say how the money was spent.
To many T.M. Landry families, tuition is not cheap — about $600 a month, or $7,200 annually. Mr. Landry’s annual salary has averaged about $86,000, according to four bankruptcy filings, which he says were driven by all of the tuition that he and his wife have covered.
“Stay awesome, stay nice, keep your game going,” Dawson Lewis said as he prepared for school.Annie Flanagan for The New York Times
Ana Howard, Ms. Lewis’s daughter, also attended T.M. Landry.Annie Flanagan for The New York Times
“Building a house on water.”
The days start at T.M. Landry with a morning meeting, chants and pep talks, a ritual meant to “center” students and help them find their voice and confidence, Mr. Landry said.
The school is based loosely on a Montessori model that emphasizes mastery, so classes are optional, the Landrys said. Younger students described their education as learning from computer programs and YouTube videos. Instructors and textbooks are on hand, but the students teach one another. Math and English lessons are taught by the Landrys, who devote most of their attention to older students preparing for the ACT. Select students take dual-enrollment courses at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette.
The main student in this article is a St. John’s student.
Louisiana School Made Headlines for Sending Black Kids to Elite Colleges. Here’s the Reality.
T.M. Landry, a school in small-town Louisiana, has garnered national attention for vaulting its underprivileged black students to elite colleges. But the school cut corners and doctored college applications.
Nov. 30, 2018
Please disable your ad blocker
Advertising helps fund Times journalism.
Former T.M. Landry students, clockwise from top left: Bryson Sassau, Liana Williams, Dawson Lewis, Avery Lewis, Ana Howard, Nyjal Mitchell, Domanick Williams, Laila Viltz, Megan Malveaux and Anthony Edmond.Annie Flanagan for The New York Times
Former T.M. Landry students, clockwise from top left: Bryson Sassau, Liana Williams, Dawson Lewis, Avery Lewis, Ana Howard, Nyjal Mitchell, Domanick Williams, Laila Viltz, Megan Malveaux and Anthony Edmond.Annie Flanagan for The New York Times
BREAUX BRIDGE, La. — Bryson Sassau’s application would inspire any college admissions officer.
A founder of T.M. Landry College Preparatory School described him as a “bright, energetic, compassionate and genuinely well-rounded” student whose alcoholic father had beaten him and his mother and had denied them money for food and shelter. His transcript “speaks for itself,” the founder, Tracey Landry, wrote, but Mr. Sassau should also be lauded for founding a community service program, the Dry House, to help the children of abusive and alcoholic parents. He took four years of honors English, the application said, was a baseball M.V.P. and earned high honors in the “Mathematics Olympiad.”
The narrative earned Mr. Sassau acceptance to St. John’s University in New York. There was one problem: None of it was true.
“I was just a small piece in a whole fathom of lies,” Mr. Sassau said.
T.M. Landry has become a viral Cinderella story, a small school run by Michael Landry, a teacher and former salesman, and his wife, Ms. Landry, a nurse, whose predominantly black, working-class students have escaped the rural South for the nation’s most elite colleges. A video of a 16-year-old student opening his Harvard acceptance letter last year has been viewed more than eight million times. Other Landry students went on to Yale, Brown, Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, Dartmouth, Cornell and Wesleyan.
Landry success stories have been splashed in the past two years on the “Today” show, “Ellen” and the “CBS This Morning.” Education professionals extol T.M. Landry and its 100 or so kindergarten-through-12th-grade students as an example for other Louisiana schools. Wealthy supporters have pushed the Landrys, who have little educational training, to expand to other cities. Small donors, heartened by the web videos, send in a steady stream of cash.
T.M. Landry College Prep, a small private school in Louisiana, boasted about its record of sending black students from working-class families to top universities. But there’s more to the story.Nov. 30, 2018
In reality, the school falsified transcripts, made up student accomplishments and mined the worst stereotypes of black America to manufacture up-from-hardship tales that it sold to Ivy League schools hungry for diversity. The Landrys also fostered a culture of fear with physical and emotional abuse, students and teachers said. Students were forced to kneel on rice, rocks and hot pavement, and were choked, yelled at and berated.
The Landrys’ deception has tainted nearly everyone the school has touched, including students, parents and college admissions officers convinced of a myth.
The colleges “want to be able to get behind the black kids going off and succeeding, and going to all of these schools,” said Raymond Smith Jr., who graduated from T.M. Landry in 2017 and enrolled at N.Y.U. He said that Mr. Landry forced him to exaggerate his father’s absence from his life on his N.Y.U. application.
“It’s a good look,” these colleges “getting these bright, high-flying, came-from-nothing-turned-into-something students,” Mr. Smith said.
This portrait of T.M. Landry emerged from interviews with 46 people: parents of former Landry students; current and former students; former teachers; and law enforcement agents. The New York Times also examined student records and court documents showing that Mr. Landry and another teacher at the school had pleaded guilty to crimes related to violence against students, and police records that included multiple witness statements saying that Mr. Landry hit children. The Breaux Bridge Police Department closed the case after deciding it was outside of its jurisdiction.
“That dream you see on television, all those videos,” said Mr. Sassau’s mother, Alison St. Julien, “it’s really a nightmare.”
In an interview with The Times, the Landrys denied falsifying transcripts and college applications, but Mr. Landry admitted that he hit students and could be rough. “Oh, I yell a lot,” he said. He goads black and white students to compete against one another because that is how the real world works, he said.
In 2013, Mr. Landry was sentenced to probation and attended an anger management program after pleading guilty to a count of battery. Despite the documentation, he insisted that he did not plead guilty or serve probation. Mr. Landry said that the victim was a student whose mother asked him to hit her child, and he said he had eased up on physical punishments.
“I don’t do that anymore,” he said.
A court document recording minutes from the sentencing hearing of Michael Landry’s battery case.
A court document recording minutes from the sentencing hearing of Michael Landry’s battery case.
Instead, he calls himself a “drill sergeant” or “coach,” and asks children to kneel before him to learn humility, for five minutes at most, Mr. Landry said.
That is not how the students have experienced it. Tyler Sassau, Mr. Sassau’s brother, said he can still feel the humiliation and smell the stench on his clothes from kneeling last year on a bathroom floor for nearly two hours.
“I wasn’t going to get up without asking him because if I did, I could’ve got something worse,” he said. “I could barely stand when I got up.”
In their defense, the Landrys touted the school’s ACT scores and high graduation and college enrollment statistics.
“We get pushed under the microscope, or under the dagger,” Mr. Landry said, because “it had been just black kids going. Society kept saying all these negative things about us because it was just easy to beat this broken-down school.”
Bryson Sassau, left, with his brother, Tyler, at their home in Lafayette, La.Annie Flanagan for The New York Times
Bryson Sassau, left, with his brother, Tyler, at their home in Lafayette, La.Annie Flanagan for The New York Times
The students who navigated the Landrys’ system and made it to the nation’s top colleges now face their own quandaries.
“I really believe that we all thought we were doing the right thing at the time, and didn’t have a choice,” Mr. Smith said. “It was a cultish mentality.”
T.M. Landry produced its first graduating class in 2013, and since then, 50 students have graduated, according to the school’s promotional materials. They have had mixed success in college.
Some alumni, especially those who spent only a short time at T.M. Landry, have been successful. Bryson Sassau did well in his classes at St. John’s, although he had to quit some advanced science and math courses. Mr. Smith also did well, but with debts mounting had to drop out after his freshman year. Another Landry graduate said he feels at home at Brown in his junior year, has maintained good grades and was recently accepted into a program that prepares students to pursue a doctoral degree.
The student in the most viral video, who spent only a short time at Landry, is in his first semester at Harvard. Other Landry students have been admitted to Harvard over the past three years, but the university declined to provide information on their status.
For yet other Landry students, particularly those who spent multiple years at the school, the results after graduation have been disappointing. Some have withdrawn from college, or transferred to less rigorous programs.
Asja Jackson, whose Wesleyan University acceptance video also went viral, decided to leave this month after she said she fell into a depression over her first-semester struggles. She said she “froze and failed” her first chemistry tests and walked out of a biology exam. Her papers, she said, were “childish,” and she was too embarrassed to attend a writing workshop.
She studied and worked through the night, like she had done at T.M. Landry since eighth grade, but she just was not “catching it,” she said. She said she eventually stopped eating, talking to her friends, leaving her room or going to class.
“I didn’t understand why people around me were doing well, and I wasn’t,” said Ms. Jackson, who took the advice of her dean and started medical leave. “I couldn’t tell my friends because they would say, ‘How did you get into the school then?’ There were too many questions that I couldn’t answer.”
At least five T.M. Landry families spoke with local law enforcement, and two more contacted the local education authorities for aid, but little changed.
Ashlee McFarlane, a lawyer at Gerger Khalil & Hennessy in Houston, said dozens of parents, students and staff have left the school and are reaching out to her for help.
“Above all,” Ms. McFarlane said, “they want to protect their children and to finally be heard.”
“He got us on the unity.”
Mr. Landry, 49, and Ms. Landry, 50, say that education lifted them from their impoverished childhoods in Breaux Bridge, near Lafayette. Ms. Landry got a nursing degree. Mr. Landry got his bachelor’s degree from the University of Southwestern Louisiana, which was later renamed the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He was a salesman and, from 2002 through 2004, a certified teacher.
The couple started T.M. Landry in 2005 as a home-school for their son and five children. The early results were not good. Two of the six students ended up in prison, Mr. Landry said. But the couple continued to recruit students from area churches, telling parishioners that teaching was their calling.
Michael and Tracey Landry holding a letter from Harvard University, in an image that was posted to T.M. Landry’s Facebook page.
Michael and Tracey Landry holding a letter from Harvard University, in an image that was posted to T.M. Landry’s Facebook page.
T.M. Landry, now an unaccredited private school, settled last year into a bare-bones factory building that Mr. Landry has compared to his students: abandoned and run down, but loved by him.
By taking no government funding, the school falls into a narrow category of educational institutions that the state does not regulate or approve, said Erin Bendily, the assistant superintendent of policy and governmental affairs at the Louisiana Department of Education. Some T.M. Landry diplomas say that students meet Louisiana state requirements, but the state does not recognize the diplomas.
“So what, we’re not accredited,” Mr. Landry said at a recruiting event this year. “Three years in a row, Harvard took us. Stanford has taken us.”
Mr. Landry said he does not participate in state scholarship programs or accept any other funding because it would impair his ability to run the school in a “nontraditional” way.
Over the years, Mr. Landry has appealed to parents whose children were struggling, bored or ignored in their public and private schools. He told them that his school had special programs for students with disabilities. Parents said he took a deep interest in their lives, called their children “baby girl” and “baby boy,” and shared personal stories about his own family members who had struggles with drugs or had been in prison.
Mr. Landry used to tout the school as created for “black troublemakers.” As it became more prominent, it started to appeal to local doctors, paralegals and small-business owners. Some white and Asian families also enrolled their children.
Black families thought that the Landrys were fighting to give their children a fair shot in a world that often believed they were only capable of being sports stars. Mr. Landry’s mantra: “Why play for a team when you can own the team?”
“The fact that he was black, I was like, ‘Man, he’s going to uplift these kids,’” said Doresa Barton, whose three children were enrolled at Landry until this year.
“He got us on the unity,” said Letarchia Lewis, a parent, and he capitalized on “a disadvantage that you know we are all a part of.”
Letarchia Lewis with her sons, Dawson, right, and Avery. Annie Flanagan for The New York Times
Letarchia Lewis with her sons, Dawson, right, and Avery. Annie Flanagan for The New York Times
The students cleaned the school, taught younger children, stayed into the night and attended year-round. Nearly every day they would call and respond “I love you” in several languages, and Mr. Landry said the word “kneel” meant “I love you” in his own language, “Mike-a-nese.”
Parents said that they were told to feed and clothe their children — and that Mr. Landry would take care of the rest. Apprehensive families were placated by videos of students solving tough math problems and being accepted to college. “When you see these videos,” Ms. Lewis said, “you want that.”
After each viral video and media appearance, donors including wealthy executives and older Americans on fixed incomes sent money. T.M. Landry took in more than $250,000 in donations this year, a portion of which was earmarked by the donors for tuition assistance, according to records of the donations obtained by The Times.
But the school has not yet offered any scholarships, said Greg Davis, a T.M. Landry board member. Mr. Landry said donations were put into a general account, but he declined to say how the money was spent.
To many T.M. Landry families, tuition is not cheap — about $600 a month, or $7,200 annually. Mr. Landry’s annual salary has averaged about $86,000, according to four bankruptcy filings, which he says were driven by all of the tuition that he and his wife have covered.
“Stay awesome, stay nice, keep your game going,” Dawson Lewis said as he prepared for school.Annie Flanagan for The New York Times
Ana Howard, Ms. Lewis’s daughter, also attended T.M. Landry.Annie Flanagan for The New York Times
“Building a house on water.”
The days start at T.M. Landry with a morning meeting, chants and pep talks, a ritual meant to “center” students and help them find their voice and confidence, Mr. Landry said.
The school is based loosely on a Montessori model that emphasizes mastery, so classes are optional, the Landrys said. Younger students described their education as learning from computer programs and YouTube videos. Instructors and textbooks are on hand, but the students teach one another. Math and English lessons are taught by the Landrys, who devote most of their attention to older students preparing for the ACT. Select students take dual-enrollment courses at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette.
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