Danny Rock answers students' burning questions
By Ivy Merkyl, Reporter

        These last few months, questions without answers have become a prominent part in our lives. To help remedy that, Vashon High School Principal Danny Rock was kind enough to answer some of the burning questions Riptide readers sent in.

Question #1: What is your favorite sports team?

Answer: “UW Huskies (football) for life! Close second place are the Sounders and then Seahawks.”

Question #2: What is one of your most embarrassing moments as a principle or student?

Answer: “Well, I've got over 25 years of material to work with, so… plenty of options. There's the time as a student when I fell asleep when studying all night for a final and slept through… the final. Another time in grade school I was playing a wicked stepsister in “Cinderella” for a school play and walked down the hall with my dress unwittingly tucked into the back of my underwear. More recently, there's been things like calling a student the wrong name for years before they finally corrected me, or last week I sent my staff a report of struggling students only to have them tell me that this was a list of students from last year. So plenty of options!”

Question #3: Will we be able to return to school in some form anytime in the foreseeable future?

Answer: “[The] million-dollar question. The short answer is that I don't think so. We were planning on starting second semester in hybrid but with the disease activity, it's hard to predict things like that right now. CES is likely pushing their planned opening back from 11/9 as the King County numbers have moved from 'moderate' to 'high' and that prevents us from going into any school-wide hybrid learning at any of our schools… However, we will carry on and at some point we will get back together and actually go to school all at the same time!”

Question #4: When/how was the tradition of painting the rock outside of VHS started?

Answer: “That is a great question. It's been a tradition for decades and I don't have the origin story. However, Jackie Merrill likely knows or someone else who was born and raised here. My wife graduated in '96 and it was around then… it was the same rock!”

EDITOR'S NOTE: Riptide Reporter Savannah Butcher wrote a great article exploring the rock’s history a few weeks back. If you want to learn more, check it out here.

Question #5: If you could live in any fictional world (and choose who you would be), where would you go? Do you like anime? What is your favorite book?

Answer: “Wow - three questions with so many amazingly cool possible answers. Well, I'm going to go with a modern fantasy world and choose the Oasis from Ready Player One as my fictional world to live in. So many cool scenes going on there. I do like anime… I'm partial to Studio Ghibli films and like a lot of the Netflix stuff that's come out the last few years. The reboot of “Voltron” is pretty good… I watch it with my son. Favorite book… is either “Lord of the Rings” or “Newer Fantasy” by Brian Sanderson including his “Stormlight Archive” series. I also love most of Isaac Asimov's books (old school!)”

Question #6: Will Japanese classes return to VHS if a new teacher becomes available?

Answer: “Not for a while, sad to say. I really valued our Japanese program and shutting it down is a low point for me in my time at VHS. We will give French a chance to take root and build and I suppose at some point in the future, if we transition again with respect to our second language, we will revisit Japanese. However, we will continue our travel program to Japan and maintain our sister city relationship [with] Himeji for sure!”

We want to give a big thank you to Principal Rock, with everything going on around figuring out online school, he’s a busy man and we appreciate him taking the time to have some fun and answer people’s pressing questions. Riptide sends out surveys every so often for articles, so if you want to ask other teachers pressing questions, follow our Instagram and keep an eye on your school email for our occasional surveys.