Best Private Elementary Schools in the Tri-Cities
The Tri-Cities private elementary market is three schools deep, all of them religious and all B-tier. Liberty Christian School in Richland is the largest by a wide margin: founded in 1980 on a 19-acre campus on Williams Boulevard, it enrolls about 560 students from preschool through twelfth grade and draws families from roughly 50 congregations across Benton and Franklin counties, which makes it the one interdenominational Christian school operating at scale in eastern Washington outside Spokane.
The other two are Catholic parish schools of the Diocese of Yakima. Christ the King School in Richland, a PreK-8 of about 400 students on Long Avenue, belongs to a parish founded in 1943 to serve the workers building the Hanford Engineer Works. St. Joseph's Catholic School in Kennewick, founded in 1964 and accredited by the Western Catholic Educational Association, enrolls about 210 students in PreK-8.
Pasco, the largest and fastest-growing of the three cities, has no private elementary school on this list; the metro's private sector sits in Richland and Kennewick and totals about 1,200 students across the three schools, against a public elementary enrollment many times that. For most Tri-Cities families the private choice is between Liberty's interdenominational K-12 and a Catholic parish school.
B Tier · 3 schools
- 001LIBERTY CHRISTIAN SCHOOL(PRIVATE SCHOOL — INDEPENDENT) · BENTON561 students
- 002CHRIST THE KING SCHOOL(PRIVATE SCHOOL — INDEPENDENT) · BENTON399 students
- 003ST JOSEPH'S CATHOLIC SCHOOL(PRIVATE SCHOOL — INDEPENDENT) · BENTON213 students
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