from other Government schools, have difficulty reading.

CedarBridge principal Ernest Payette, a man who knows what he is talking about and is not tied to the Department of Education, has been quoted as saying: "When you have 17-year-olds functioning at a grade nine level, there has to be concern.'' Mr. Payette has declined to speculate as to why some students are well below their expected level but the good news is that he feels it is obvious that for some, it is not a lack of ability.

We think Bermuda can be very grateful that Mr. Payette has become a major part of the education system because he is now insisting on programmes to deal with low literacy skills. If Mr. Payette had not arrived to run CedarBridge Bermuda might still be drifting on and doing very little.

"Someone'' has to accept responsibility for that fact and that someone is the Department of Education which allowed young people to pass through the system without basic skills. If they did not teach a child to read properly, they did not teach a child anything. Senior people at the Department must now accept the responsibility and accept the inevitable.

There has been a tendency recently to criticise Education Minister Jerome Dill for the problems in his ministry. We see that as unfair. Mr. Dill is stretching to rectify difficult problems which were not of his making. He has refused to do any finger pointing and the reason is simple. It is unseemly for a Minister to point at civil servants in public and difficult to point at his predecessors as Minister who presided over the creation of this problem. We all know that Mr. Dill is trying for solutions having inherited this mess, largely from Gerald Simons and Clarence Terceira.

As one example. Some years ago this newspaper carried an editorial titled "Illiterate Johnny'', dealing with the failures of the education system in the areas of reading and writing. We were severely, loudly and publicly criticised by Gerald Simons, who was the Education Minister, and who told the public that such problems were well in the past. Now it seems certain that if Mr. Simons had only listened, Mr. Payette, CedarBridge and, most importantly, Bermuda's young people, might be better off today. Dr. Terceira, who followed Mr. Simons as Minister, had to be aware of the problem but did little or nothing for Bermuda's students.

CedarBridge was created to prevent young people from falling through the cracks. Therefore Mr. Payette is quite correct in identifying cracks where he finds them and in asking for resources to create solutions. He is doing his job. Mr. Dill, as Minister, has promised that there will be a tutorial system, allowing one on one teaching to give individuals with a problem more attention and more intensive instruction. It will need to be an extensive system since nearly half of CedarBridge's students have been identified as below the acceptable reading level.

Now Government needs to do something about those people who allowed the cracks to open.