Dallas gurukula (TKG Academy)

ISKCON’s first gurukula (boarding school) was at the Dallas temple on Gurley Avenue, in a former church building in East Dallas. The Dallas Morning News and Nori Muster date its opening to 1971; ISKCON’s education directory says Prabhupada established it in 1972. In the early 1970s it was the movement’s only gurukula, and children were sent there by their parents from around the world. In February 1975 the South African magazine Personality reported about 100 children aged four to ten, who saw their parents about once a year. It named the headmaster as Mike Wright, “a 6ft 4in. former Marine” with the religious name Dayananda das Adhikari. A Texas welfare official told the magazine that he “could find no evidence of cruelty”.

Former pupils later described the school very differently. Anonymous accounts compiled by VOICE in 1996–97 and quoted by the Dallas Morning News in 1998 describe beatings, a child locked in a dark closet, and hunger. In the Dallas Observer in 2001, a former pupil said the headmaster Dayananda was “particularly brutal, punching and kicking kids”, and former pupils described daily whippings and nights of solitary confinement. Jan Brzezinski (Hiranyagarbha, later Jagadananda Das), who taught there “on and off from 1972-75”, wrote in 1997 that there were very few qualified teachers and that the schedule for about a hundred children was “far too demanding”. He asked forgiveness for acts of violence towards children in which he had been involved. In 1998 the New York Times, reporting ISKCON’s own published study, said the highest levels of abuse in the American schools were in Dallas, Seattle and New Vrindaban.

In March 1976 the GBC still listed Dallas among four central gurukulas in North America and resolved that children over eight would go to Mayapur and then Vrindavan. The boarding school closed later in 1976. The Dallas Morning News wrote that it closed “not because of abuse but because the building did not meet state codes”. The Dallas Observer reported that Prabhupada decided to close it after bad publicity had state health inspectors and social workers “ready to shutter the school”. It quotes Jagadish Das, later ISKCON’s education minister, recalling “a very strongly worded letter from Prabhupada” which made clear that “the government was going to shut us down”.

Nori Muster’s timeline records a new gurukula opening in Dallas in 1979. That was the year Tamal Krishna Goswami became zonal guru over Dallas, according to the Dallas Observer. A parent quoted by the Observer said the new school was “very hush-hush”: “The leaders didn’t want the state authorities knowing they were running a school.” Fred Clark (Gostabihari), a teacher in its boys’ ashram, was charged in 1984 by two brothers and was reported in 2001 to be serving 30 years in prison. The school was later reopened as a day school, “Kalachandji’s School”, and has been incorporated as TKG Academy (a pre-K to 8 private school) since 2002; “TKG” stands for Tamal Krishna Goswami, after whom it is named (Wikipedia). ISKCON’s Central Office of Child Protection found in 2021 that a teacher there had neglected and verbally and emotionally abused a young pupil in 2016–2018.

Former Dallas pupils were among the plaintiffs in the 2000 federal lawsuit against ISKCON, which was filed in Dallas.