Government was last night accused of stifling debate on the CedarBridge Academy mould crisis after failing to allow MPs to discuss a damning report in the House of Assembly.

Shadow Health Minister Louise Jackson said she was “not only disappointed but disgusted” by Education Minister Randy Horton’s failure to take up a motion on the Wachiira Report into the closure of the school due to mould infestation during the final sitting of the House of Assembly on June 29.

Mrs. Jackson told The Royal Gazette the chance of the topic being re-tabled by Mr. Horton when the House sits again in November was zero.

“It’s all done,” she said. “What he did was just to carry it over week after week and then, of course, they got down to the last week and we didn’t know it was going to be the last week.

“That came as a shock to us. We were putting so much heat on them on so many different angles, they decided to close the House down.”

Shadow Education Minister Grant Gibbons said the Opposition was effectively gagged by the motion because MPs are not allowed to raise a subject for debate which is already on the order paper.

“In effect there was a ‘gag order’ on the subject in the House until the Minister took up his motion for debate,” said Dr. Gibbons. “It’s a defensive move that has been used before by the Government. The motion will expire over the summer and will have to be re-introduced in November if Government actually wants to debate it.”

The Wachiira Report was commissioned by Mr. Horton after he shut down CedarBridge Academy on November 1 last year for a massive clean up of mould after complaints of sickness from teachers.

The review team - led by overseas environment specialist Kamoji Wachiira - discovered that one child nearly died and at least 13 others suffered illnesses “very probably” caused by mould contamination at the Island’s largest public school.

The annexes to the report - which contain detailed information on how mould took hold of the Devonshire campus and how senior management dealt with the crisis - appeared to have been removed from public view yesterday.

The Royal Gazette studied the annexes at the Bermuda Archives at the end of May and alerted Government to the fact that confidential information, including the names of sick students who had given evidence to the inquiry, was included.

The Ministry of Education said then that the wrong copy had been given to the archives and indicated that a different version would be made available.

But Mrs. Jackson said she had twice been refused the file at the archives and that a request to Stanley Lowe, the Speaker of the House, on the matter had elicited no response.

“The meat of that report was in those annexes,” she said. “I went there twice and I was denied. We then wrote a letter to the Speaker of the House to say that we would not be able, could not possibly, debate this motion on the mould at CedarBridge unless we had access to the appendices. The Speaker did not get back.”

The Ministry of Education did not respond to questions on the House motion or the annexes yesterday. Mr. Lowe was unavailable for comment.