Author: Krista Allen

“When you think about the whole school being closed, you think, ‘OK, the kids are gone, the employees are gone –– it’s officially closed.’ But it wasn’t. And we had advocated for that and that’s what people don’t understand.”

Clasin also announced that Rocky Ridge educator Laverne Bitsui also passed on yesterday. It is not known if she was infected by the coronavirus. People from the area have been expressing their condolences to her family.

“And I asked them if they are OK and they said, ‘Yeah,’” Holly said. “They told us (Holly and her sisters) we couldn’t come to the house to visit them. The only thing we could do was phone calls, which was really hard on us because we had to be isolated from them and we couldn’t really do anything.”

Dozens of people from at least seven Western Navajo chapters — Cameron, Chilchinbeto, Coppermine, Kaibeto, LeChee, Tonalea-Red Lake and Navajo Mountain — and from other places were at that rally, according to a number of people familiar with the gathering, who were all interviewed by the Navajo Times on Friday, Saturday, Monday and on Wednesday morning.