Education Minister Randy Horton deserves a certain amount of credit for both commissioning and releasing the report on the CedarBridge Academy mould crisis, not least because it does not reflect well on his Ministry.

Indeed, the best that can be said for it is that it reinforces the arguments for wholesale reform of the Education Ministry. All of the criticisms levelled at the Ministry of Education in the Hopkins report are repeated here, both at the Ministry and at the school administration level.

What is clear is that the dead hand of bureaucracy has had as great an effect at CedarBridge as it has had throughout the whole system. Complaints were ignored for more than six years, and it was only when the teachers at the school threatened to strike that Mr. Horton, on the advice of then-Permanent Secretary Rosemary Tyrrell, closed the school.

Mr. Horton has largely escaped criticism in this whole episode, not least because he had barely warmed his seat when the crisis became publicly known. The same cannot be said for his two immediate predecessors, Terry Lister and Neletha Butterfield, who have said nothing about this. But the revelation that the school was only closed because of the strike threat suggests that the school board, the senior civil servants in the Ministry and Mr. Horton himself would have allowed the situation to continue to fester without the threat of industrial action, and that in itself is damning.

The report, and Mr. Horton (under the guise of appealing for the issue not to be turned into a political football) said the problems began when the building was built when the United Bermuda Party was in power. This may well be so.

What should be of greater concern is that the problems took ten years to come to light, and that some $25 million — a vast sum — of necessary maintenance was never done.

Worse, the CedarBridge board appointed one of its own members, Ross Smith, to be the maintenance manager, without properly advertising the job. Mr. Smith, it would appear, did not have the qualifications to do what was clearly a complex job, and never go them once he was appointed.

The board comes in for a fair amount of criticism aside from that piece of negligence. Much of it no doubt, is deserved, but some may not be. Unlike the boards of trustees of aided schools, the CedarBridge trustees do not own their buildings, and therefore, presumably have little leverage with the Ministry. Principals across the Island will also confirm that attempts to get money from the Government for standard preventative maintenance is next to impossible. Whether CedarBridge asked for the funds that have should have been spent is not known. What is likely is that if CedarBridge did ask for the money, it probably was not granted.

The Hopkins report recommends that all schools should have governing boards, a proposal this newspaper supports. But the boards must have freedom to act. The betting here is that the CedarBridge board is being held accountable when there was probably little it could do about the situation without the Education Ministry’s agreement, and the same goes for Kalmar Richards, the much-criticised principal.

Having said all that, Mrs. Richards and the board should do the honourable thing and resign. The school community must surely have lost confidence in them by now, and it is hard to see how they can continue.

CedarBridge needs a fresh start.