Sojourner-Douglass College is being sued by the owner of its Edgewater campus property for failure to pay rent, according to school officials and the plaintiff's attorney.
The lawsuit, filed last month in Anne Arundel County District Court, is the latest in a series of setbacks for the Baltimore-based school, which has satellite campuses in Maryland and in the Bahamas.
Sojourner-Douglass President Charles W. Simmons said the school is working to get caught up on rent payments to Annapolis-based developer SDC 214 LLC. The company's attorney said Sojourner-Douglass is behind two monthly payments of about $29,000 a month.
Simmons said financial shortfalls mean some Sojourner-Douglass staff members did not receive paychecks for the most recent pay period, which ended last Friday. He said some senior staff were initially asked not to cash checks for the previous period — which ended the day after Christmas — but those checks have since been honored.
Simmons said the latest problems came after the November decision by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education to withdraw the school's accreditation, citing inadequate financial resources. The school has appealed the decision.
Sojourner-Douglass receives much of its funding from federal Pell Grants, and Simmons said losing accreditation prompted the U.S. Department of Education to place the college on a list for increased monitoring.
"They said they were not going to honor any of our requests for payment for financial aid until we went back five years and reconciled all of our financial aid accounts," Simmons said. He said the department has agreed to expedite the school's aid requests, which should allow the school to pay staff and get caught up on its rental payments.
"That should solve this cash-flow problem we have had that has caused us to delay some payment of the payroll," he said.
A spokesman for the Education Department said he could not comment.
Elizabeth Sibolski, president of the Middle States Commission, declined to comment on whether Sojourner-Douglass' financial woes would affect its appeal.
Tarrant Lomax, attorney for SDC 214, said the developer has the right to evict the college from the property, but has not decided to do so yet.
He said the owners have "been willing all along to work with them as they get through this accreditation issue, and certainly we don't want to do anything that will compromise students."
"But my client has his own obligations, and it's imperative the rent gets paid," Lomax said.
Founded as the Homestead-Montebello Center of Antioch College in 1972, Sojourner-Douglass serves primarily nontraditional students. Simmons said the school has an enrollment of 850. Before the news about its financial problems, he said, Sojourner-Douglass had as many as 1,300 students.
He said the school has about 250 faculty members. About half are core faculty, he said; the rest are adjuncts.