Navajo Prep Names New Student Residence After Founding Board Member

Charley Long Sr. was in the room when Navajo Preparatory High School came into existence in 1991. Thirty-five years later, his name is on one of its buildings.

Navajo Prep's Board of Trustees passed a resolution at its March meeting officially naming the school's newest student residence "Long Home" in honor of Long, a founding board member whose tenure spans the full history of the Farmington institution. The dedication permanently attaches his name to campus infrastructure and, in the school's own framing, to its institutional memory.

Long Home, completed in 2024, is a 16-room building designed to house up to 32 students. The facility was built with student wellbeing and cultural identity woven into its physical design: it includes Jack-and-Jill bathrooms, student gathering spaces, a healing room, a counseling office, a kitchen, and built-in safety features. The courtyard centers on a Navajo wedding basket design, and the building's architecture throughout integrates Diné cultural values into the spaces where students live and gather daily.

For Navajo Prep, which draws students from remote communities across the Navajo Nation and surrounding areas, on-campus housing is not a supplemental amenity but a core part of the school's educational model. Long Home expands the school's residential capacity and gives more students the option to live and learn on campus rather than commute from distant homes.

Navajo Prep described Long as a leader whose humility and dedication have benefited both the school and the Navajo people. The school credited his decades of guidance with helping shape the institution's success, and said Long Home will stand as a lasting tribute to that service.

The resolution also carries a clear institutional signal: by naming the residence after a founding tribal member, the school grounds its built environment in the community that created it. Long's name now belongs to the daily life of every student who walks through those doors.