Best Private Elementary Schools in Bellingham
Whatcom County's private elementary field is small and entirely church-affiliated: four schools qualify, three Christian and one Catholic, and the county has no secular independent elementary school, which sets it apart from every other Washington metro on this site. Lynden Christian Schools in Lynden is the only A-tier school and the regional anchor. Founded in 1910 out of the area's Christian Reformed congregations, it enrolls about 1,200 students from preschool through twelfth grade across clustered elementary, middle, and high school campuses, one of the larger non-Catholic Christian school systems in the state.
Three B-tier Bellingham schools follow. Bellingham Christian School, founded in 1960, is a nondenominational PreK-12 of about 340 students spread across its Cordata and Sunset Drive campuses, drawing from Bellingham, Ferndale, and Lynden. The Franklin Academy, in the Columbia neighborhood north of downtown, is faith-based but tied to no denomination and enrolls about 330 students in PreK-8; it grew out of St. Paul's Academy, which stopped operating under that name in 2024. Assumption Catholic School on Cornwall Avenue is Whatcom County's only Catholic school, a PreK-8 of about 220 students whose parish dates to 1889 and whose school building opened in 1913.
The geography is the story. Lynden's Dutch Reformed tradition supports a Christian K-12 system larger than the three Bellingham schools combined, while Bellingham itself, a city of 95,000 with a university, supports one Catholic parish school and two small Christian programs. Families in Whatcom County who want a secular private elementary cross into Skagit County or the Seattle metro.
A Tier · 1 school
- 001LYNDEN CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS(PRIVATE SCHOOL — INDEPENDENT) · WHATCOM1,211 students
B Tier · 3 schools
- 002BELLINGHAM CHRISTIAN SCHOOL(PRIVATE SCHOOL — INDEPENDENT) · WHATCOM344 students
- 003ASSUMPTION CATHOLIC SCHOOL(PRIVATE SCHOOL — INDEPENDENT) · WHATCOM223 students
- 004THE FRANKLIN ACADEMY(PRIVATE SCHOOL — INDEPENDENT) · WHATCOM331 students
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