Education

In 2016, while she was still an undergrad at Julliard, Ariel Horowitz got a strange phone call from her mother, a curriculum consultant for Navajo Technical University.

Shaniah Chee was sitting in her mother’s truck outside Monument Valley High School, Utah, where she graduated from four years earlier, because she was trying to connect to wi-fi.

A week after the Wide Ruins School Board was supposed to show why the school shouldn’t be taken over by the Division of Diné Education, the board placed the school’s principal on administrative leave and reinstated its business manager, whom the principal had earlier placed on leave.

Cina Curley was always told she was smart and good in school. When she was eight or so, she started picturing herself as a college student attending an Ivy League university.