Skyline’s principal has added an additional video piece to the school’s morning announcements called “Ask Mr. Mcdaniel A Question.” Every week on Wednesday, teachers show students the video announcements from YouTube. Starting November 20, 2024, Robert Mcdaniel added a segment onto the school’s videos. Since Mcdaniel is new to Skyline this school year, he was getting a lot of questions and wanted to address them in front of the school.
“That was kind of the whole intent was to get to know me, but also if someone asks a question, it’d be fun to answer it for everybody,” Mcdaniel says.
The assistant principal Benjamin Anderson does a similar thing, where he makes a video for the students that ranges from giving students motivation and life advice to funny videos that give a cheerful energy to the rest of the videos. Since Anderson has started, more teachers and students have gotten involved in the clips.
Mcdaniel said that at first he just tried to upload the videos on the announcements, but when that didn’t work he went to the publicity officers for help. The school’s publicity officers are the ones who put the morning announcements together. One of these is Kate Hinckley, who showed Mcdaniel how to upload his videos to the announcements.
“He just saw Mr. Anderson’s videos, and he wanted to do something like that and be more involved,” Hinckley said about how the “Ask Mr. Mcdaniel A Question” videos began.
The questions are submitted by students either through email or in person. This has allowed for more involvement between Mcdaniel and the whole school. With the less serious inquiries, it shows that the principal is not as scary as he may have seemed at the beginning of the year.
There has not been a specific theme to the different episodes. The subject has a wide range, from students asking about the school’s new phone policy to asking the principal if water is wet.
When Mcdaniel was asked if he liked answering the serious or funny questions more he said that he likes both. “Sometimes there’s stuff that people want information, and sometimes people are just kind of being clever or silly, and those are fun too,” he added.
Although as the school year is coming closer to an end, the questions have been less frequent and not every week has had a question.
In one episode, instead of answering a question, Mcdaniel told a dad joke. Mcdaniel said he hopes people will continue to submit questions and that he plans to do this through the end of the year so that students can get to know him better.
