Embattled Tacoma private school to stay open after ‘generous supporter’ steps in
Tacoma private school Sound Christian Academy told families Friday that it will remain open next year, in a reversal of its previous announcement that its doors would close for good in June.
The decision, made after the school received a significant amount of money from a private supporter, comes as the school faces two separate pending lawsuits. One alleges the school failed to repay money owed to a private lender. Another alleges the school didn’t reimburse its former treasurer after the Internal Revenue Service came after him for taxes the school owed.
Interim Head of School Matthew Richey wrote The News Tribune via text message Monday that he is not free to comment on legal matters.
Families that have applied or enrolled in another school but would like to return to Sound Christian Academy are eligible for a fee waiver, according to an email to families from the school’s Board of Directors on Friday that announced the school’s plans to remain open.
The school won’t look completely the same: Sound Christian Academy will become a Pre-K through 8th grade school in 2025-2026 and will no longer serve high school students, according to the email.
“A very generous supporter has given us sufficient funding for us to be able to finish out the current school year,” Richey wrote in a message. “We are finalizing the details that will allow us to address our debt and ensure that we complete the upcoming school year.”
Richey did not directly respond to The News Tribune’s questions about the amount of the new financial support or about the sustainability of the school’s funding moving forward, writing that he couldn’t share more at this time. He also wrote that “more details on funding have been shared with our community and will continue to be shared as appropriate.”
The announcement marks a 180-degree turn from the previous announcement that the school would be closing following years of budget troubles. The News Tribune reported that the school first braced for a full halt to operations in early March, but held on in part by raising over $210,000 from the community through a five-day fundraising campaign. Parents were later told that the school had received additional funding allowing classes to continue through the end of the year on June 13.
Lawsuits filed against Sound Christian Academy
Two people have filed lawsuits in Pierce County Superior Court this year against South Sound Christian Schools, which is Sound Christian Academy’s registered nonprofit name in the state’s corporations and charities database.
Elizabeth Henning filed a lawsuit on Jan. 13 that alleges she loaned money to Sound Christian Academy that wasn’t repaid. She and her late husband, Dwane Henning, were longtime supporters of the school, according to the complaint. Dwane served on the Sound Christian Academy School Board and passed away in 2022 at the couple’s home in Lakewood, according to his obituary. The family asked loved ones to make donations to the school in lieu of sending flowers. The school’s annual golf tournament was named after him.
Between Jan. 23, 2023 and March 31, 2023, Elizabeth Henning agreed to lend the school $500,000 at an interest rate of 7.5% per year, according to her lawsuit, using property the school owns as collateral. The complaint alleges that the school was supposed to repay her in full on or before July 1, 2023, and that it didn’t.
The complaint said the $500,000 was on top of $3.2 million she lent the school in prior years.
The News Tribune reached out to Henning’s attorneys via phone Monday for comment, but did not immediately hear back.
In another lawsuit filed on April 14, a former school board member, Ron Nelson, alleged that he personally bore the consequences of the school’s unpaid taxes when the Internal Revenue Service forced him to pay debts the school owed. His attorney in the case, Steve O’Ban, told The News Tribune in a phone call Tuesday that Nelson served as treasurer on the board largely in an unpaid volunteer capacity.
According to Nelson’s complaint, the school struggled to pay its bills for much of the 20 years he was involved there, “chiefly due to insufficient tuition revenue because of low enrollment.” Enrollment allegedly began to decline in 2009, and despite slight increases in 2016-2018 and 2022-2024, the numbers weren’t enough to cover the school’s expenses. Since around 2012, the school “has chronically struggled to make payroll, pay its IRS payroll withholding taxes, cover utility costs, maintain its buildings, and keep current with other vendors,” the complaint alleges. It also alleges that the school relied on federal COVID-19 pandemic relief programs to make payroll and pay the IRS in 2020-2022, leaving a financial gap when those funding streams ended.
The school failed to pay multiple quarters of payroll taxes in 2022 and 2023, Nelson’s lawsuit alleges, and the IRS “placed a lien on his home, threatened foreclosure, and forced him to refinance his home to pay off SCA’s IRS obligation for four quarters of withholding taxes in the amount of $304,000.”
When Nelson requested that the school reimburse him, the school allegedly refused and removed him from his position. His requests, and requests from his representatives, to discuss the issue and seek a resolution were repeatedly turned down, the complaint alleges.
Nelson alleges in his complaint that board members, administrators and finance staff were all aware of the school’s past history of struggling to pay IRS taxes, and were part of the decision not to pay the IRS in 2022 and 2023, but that the school falsely accused him of independently choosing not to pay the taxes.
O’Ban told The News Tribune that Nelson and Henning both “have worked closely with the school to try to help it through these substantially financially difficult times for over the last 10 to 15 years.”
Nelson would have preferred to resolve things outside of court, the attorney said, but was forced to take action because of the school’s lack of responsiveness.
Sound Christian Academy’s budget troubles
The school’s debts have accumulated in recent years, according to The News Tribune’s previous interviews with Richey, who said he has served as the interim head of the school since January 2024 and taught there for about 10 years prior. He cited reasons for the budget shortfall such as periods of low enrollment, inflation, and “poor stewardship,” while declining to share specifics. The school’s financial difficulties forced the school to delay payments to staff by several days, and Richey previously told The News Tribune that the vast majority of the $210,000-plus raised in March went to pay teachers and staff.
Spanaway resident Tamra Pfingston, 48, and her husband have two third-graders at Sound Christian Academy. She said she’s satisfied with the school’s transparency with families this past year: “I feel like we got what we needed to know, and that I feel like they were trying to work out a solution for the financial problems that were being found out,” she told The News Tribune in a phone call on Tuesday.
Her kids started going to the school in kindergarten. At Sound Christian, her son got the support he needed in special education, and she saw her daughter grow socially, physically and mentally in the school’s basketball program last year. Her kids have thrived with the class sizes, and felt loved by their teachers, she said.
While the last few months have brought uncertainty, she said she’s kept up faith that the school would pull through.
“I was trusting that the kids would be able to go there next year, that God was going to keep it open,” she said. “It’s done so much good for my kids.”
Asked if she knew about the school’s financial struggles, she told The News Tribune that she was aware of them but didn’t know the extent until recently. Having grown up in private school and homeschooling, she said she knows that private schools often struggle if they don’t have enough support from churches and the community.
“I was astounded by the amount of debt that had been accrued,” she said. “That was rather shocking.”
She said she didn’t feel that the school withheld information about how much debt it had accumulated.
“I believe the situation was very fluid and they were finding out about debt as they looked deeper into the situation,” she wrote in a Facebook message shortly after the phone call.
Are private schools struggling statewide?
The News Tribune reached out to the Washington Federation of Independent Schools to learn if other private schools are facing similar financial challenges. Sound Christian Academy is a member of the Washington Federation of Independent Schools, which advocates for policies in Olympia that support private schools statewide, according to the organization’s website.
Suzie Hanson, the organization’s executive director, told The News Tribune via phone Monday that she isn’t seeing any broad patterns statewide in private schools’ enrollment going up or down. Some Christian schools are struggling, others aren’t, she said.
She added that private schools face all kinds of costs that make running a school “exceptionally expensive.” Those bills could include rent, if a school doesn’t own their buildings; property taxes; payroll for teachers that meets a livable wage for their area; financial aid offers; school insurance and other expenses.
A few years of under-enrollment can hit a private school hard, she said.
“Funding is connected to enrollment,” Hanson said. “... you lose enough students, you can get in the red pretty quickly. Most private schools plan for that.”
Asked what she would advise a parent to look for in a private school to discern its financial health, she said she’d suggest asking the head of school if the school has any money in reserves at the end of the year, or an endowment of some kind — something set aside that will cover the school for at least six months, she said. That could look like a school setting aside $10,000 or $20,000 each year, maybe more for some schools, she said.
Getting enrollment up and adjusting staffing are the best ways for a private school to recover financially, she said.
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This story was originally published May 7, 2025 at 10:00 AM.
