Photo by ekelly80

The Washington Post’s Bill Turque reports that the D.C. Public Charter School Board puled the charters for two charter schools, Children’s Studio and Academy for Learning through the Arts (ALTA), and may move to revoke the charter of another, Kamit Institute for Magnificent Achievers (KIMA). On the day many area school students and teachers are celebrating as the first day of summer, parents of children at Children’s Studio and ALTA must now grapple with the fact that their kids do not have schools to return to.

Turque writes that KIMA — whose model follows “the great Kamitic (Ancient Egyptian) founders of civilization who nurtured inner intelligence to produce exceptional knowledge and inventive power” — suffered manifold problems. The school’s truancy rates (30%) were barely beat by its 2009 DC-CAS reading and math proficiency rates (45%). The proficiency scores at Children’s Studio were worse. Only 33% of the students at ALTA even took the math and reading proficiency tests.

The timing on these charter revocations leaves parents the summer to find new schools, but that must come as a cold comfort: Most will have to scramble to find a decent charter school that doesn’t have a waiting list. Given the poor academic character of these three schools, however, parents may have dodged a bullet.