Chinle High School is a high school (grades 9 to 12) in Chinle, an unincorporated area of Apache County, Arizona, United States. The school is the only high school in the Chinle Unified School District, and all of the district's elementary and middle schools feed into it. Chinle High School serves several unincorporated areas in Apache County, including Chinle, Lukachukai, Many Farms, Rough Rock, Tsaile, and some areas considered to be Nazlini. The areas the school serves are within the Navajo Nation.
The school is the largest high school within the Navajo nation. As of 2012 it has 1,130 students and 125 staff and faculty. 99% of the students are Native Americans, mainly Navajo.
The school's basketball teams play in the 7,000-seat Wildcat Den, Arizona's largest high school sports arena. It was built in 2006 at a cost of $23 million and called by The Arizona Republic sports columnist Richard Obert as "the best high school arena in Arizona". It is also tied for the 15th-largest high school basketball gymnasium in the United States. Before playing in the Wildcat Den, the teams played at the 1,000-seat Chinle Community Center.
The school, like others in the district, has been troubled by gang activity. In 2003, a display of weapons confiscated from students included baseball bats, knives, nunchucks and brass knuckles.
Famous quotes containing the words high and/or school:
“Processions that lack high stilts have nothing that catches the eye.
What if my great-granddad had a pair that were twenty foot high,
And mine were but fifteen foot, no modern stalks upon higher,
Some rogue of the world stole them to patch up a fence or a fire.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“For those parents from lower-class and minority communities ... [who] have had minimal experience in negotiating dominant, external institutions or have had negative and hostile contact with social service agencies, their initial approaches to the school are often overwhelming and difficult. Not only does the school feel like an alien environment with incomprehensible norms and structures, but the families often do not feel entitled to make demands or force disagreements.”
—Sara Lawrence Lightfoot (20th century)