More Priorities (cont.)

ADDITIONAL PRIORITIES & FOCUSES FOR DESOTO (cont.)

Improved City Communication to Residents

Concerns: Over the years, DeSoto has improved their communications with the citizens. I just think that with the digital world of today we need to improve it further to more align with the citizen’s digital realities and norms of today.

Solution Ideas: I think the city should either give a raise to the existing or hire a new full-time Digital Marketing Expert. And one of the top priorities should be to dramatically improve the "My DeSoto" City of DeSoto app. In order to access the app you must put in your address. If you live in DeSoto, then you get full access to the app. On the app it should show everything that is going on in DeSoto for at least 3 months out. Everything that the average citizen should know or be aware of including all of the resources available to them by the City should be accessible within the app. Everybody has a cell phone nowadays and everybody uses apps.

Schools

Concerns: Some parents move to cities primarily based on how good the school district is. The better our schools, the more attractive DeSoto will be to families. The children are our future and they deserve the best education that we can give them. In light of the current uncertainty in the Department of Education, and the high probability of Texas approving school vouchers this year, we must rethink how we are educating our students in our public schools. For the citizens who are unaware of how school vouchers work. Currently public schools get about $15,000 per student from both the State and Federal government combined. With school voucher programs, instead of the public school systems getting money per student, the State will pay the parents money directly in a State approved education savings account. The parents can then use that money to place their student in any private or home school that they want. When this happens that $15,000 per student goes away from the public school budget. The more students that are pulled out of public schools the less money the public schools will have, thus creating a death spiral of available funds to pay for quality teachers and quality facilities which will affect the quality of education delivered to the children. When that happens the city must raise property taxes to make up for the shortfall which affects all of us. This would reduce the available disposable income of our residents affecting the economic growth potential for the city. Here is a good article explaining school vouchers https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/23/texas-vouchers/

Solutions Ideas: I do understand that the schools have their separate budget but I think the solution should be a revamping on the way the students are taught to learn. The traditional way was designed for the industrial age. The students today must be prepared for the digital world. DeSoto has improved over the last few years however, a good school that comes to mind in the area is Village Tech School in Duncanville. They provide a hands-on approach to learning where the students are fully involved in most all aspects of learning. They are required to work together on projects and are given responsibilities like they are young adults and the kids respond accordingly. It’s quite impressive the approach they have taken. The kids are learning excellent life skills, in a hands-on way and they have fun doing it. It has all of the aspects of an expensive private school but it is a public school. For the parents with children in that school they have no need or reason to put their kid in a private school. Also we must enhance our restrictions on non-DeSoto resident students enrolling in our schools. We should only accept non-resident students that have B average or higher for the entire previous school year and they must have been involved in an extracurricular activity and they must have a referral from someone at their previous school or someone in their community. One of our biggest problems was when we allowed non-resident students to enroll in our schools without vetting them properly.

Citizen Health

Concerns: The saying goes “A healthy person has many goals. A sick person has only one goal”. A sick population creates an economic drain on both the city and the citizens. Everyone knows that the cost of healthcare has gone way up. We all need to ask ourselves, have we gotten healthier since the pandemic or sicker. Most people will say that either themselves or people they know have gotten sicker. The very basic foundation that we all need to start is having the ability to purchase organic fruits and vegetables at a reasonable cost. Conventionally raised fruits and vegetables are heavily sprayed with pesticides and we all have to eat so when we buy these chemically laced fruits and vegetables at the stores we are consuming pesticides and we slowly get sicker and sicker wondering what happened. And when the next pandemic happens, not if but when, the sicker someone is the harder time they will have in their recovery process.

Solutions: Our beautiful parks, (the Parks Department is doing an excellent job by the way) could host a DeSoto Farmer’s Market Weekend once a month in one of their beautiful parks in which local and North Texas regional farmers can come out and sell our citizens, organic fruits and vegetables. We can require that only organically grown crops can be sold at our DeSoto Farmer’s Market days. We also need to ensure that our city’s water stations continually have the most up to date top of the line filters. Since we get our water from Dallas, municipal water supplies normally have hidden chemicals in them that can slowly cause health problems over time.

Senior Care

Concerns: Of course all of us need to care about our elderly. We can only hope to get there in age if we are not there already. Some are active and some are unable to be active. We need to care for both.

Solutions: Since most seniors are on a fixed income if we execute my DeSoto Economics First plan then it should bring the city more commercial tax revenue. With the extra revenue it should be used wisely with one of the goals being to help keep the residential taxes low. The last thing we need is for our seniors to be burdened more and more with higher residential taxes. We need to also expand our Senior Center. Our number of seniors will only increase so we need to accommodate accordingly for the active ones. For the inactive and/or disabled seniors, most of those programs are handled in the private sector so the city needs to fully support any business that helps the elderly in any way. My father was fully disabled before he passed away so I fully understand what it takes to care for a disabled senior. It should be no question; they should get whatever they need. That is the least that we can do for them.

Single Parents

Concerns: With the increased number of single parent households’ primarily single women. It is crucial that we give them as much help as possible.

Solutions: After school programs for the kids should be fully funded and expanded.

Special Needs Care

Concerns: Anyone that is caring for a special needs person cannot do the same things as the average citizen. They have to spend their extra time, money and resources in the constant care for their special needs family member. Also the special needs person is often secluded from society. I have a special needs cousin so I have seen some of the things that it takes.

Solutions: The city should support any and all programs that are geared toward helping our most vulnerable citizens. A good source of entertainment for a special needs person could be at least one of our parks install a play area with equipment just for them. Also our library could have a sensory neutral area dedicated for them if the space allows.

Learn & Earn Workshops

Concerns: Our city has many talented and highly educated people. Some of them will gladly like to share some of their knowledge and experiences with others in the community. Our citizens need to have a steady flow of interesting diverse topics in which they can learn about new things. Who knows, someone could find a new career or hobby from something new that they learn.

Solutions: DeSoto needs to have a TED talk style in-person ongoing presentation series where people of various expertise talk about something that may be interesting to the public. The format can be the speaker talks about their subject for about an hour and take questions for about 30 minutes. For example, someone may be an expert on credit repair, on basic finances, on knitting, on starting a home garden, on health, on starting a small business, on how to do public speaking, investing in real estate, crypto, etc. The topic can be anything as long as it is something interesting for the public. This will keep the community engaged in always learning new and interesting things. If the speaker has a business related to the subject they are talking about then they can promote their business at the end of their talk. These talks should be recorded and archived on our city’s website in a new Learn & Earn section and also uploaded to the city’s YouTube channel as well where all of our citizens can go back and review it at any time. Our citizens will love us for it.

Law Enforcement

Concerns: First, our DeSoto law enforcement team has been doing a great job overall. We understand that the job is inherently dangerous and stressful but is necessary. I do also understand that they are never fully staffed so with that and the normal attrition they are in a constant shortage of manpower for all of the necessary things they need to do. On top of this they constantly need working equipment to do their jobs effectively such as squad car maintenance, gear, and normal equipment. They need to be able to have a better say-so on how and where they can use their funds so they can make sure everything stays up and running with a smooth efficient operation. Also, considering our city’s demographics we just need more citizens aware of the basics in interacting with our law enforcement. This will go a long way for our citizens. Some of our previous experiences with other city’s law enforcement agencies and preconceived notions don’t necessarily apply to our DeSoto law enforcement team.

Solutions: First, the police need the funds from City Council to get fully staffed including accounting for normal attrition every year. Second, they need more control of where they can allocate their funds for the maximum benefit. And third, maybe our Citizens Police Advisory Committee could help with this, if not then the police department but there could be a free “Citizen’s Basic Law Enforcement Awareness Course” tab under the Law Enforcement tab on the city’s website. Any citizen should be able to click on the tab and it will start a basic informative course of no more than 50 items, videos and questions. Before the course starts it should give an approximate time that it will take to finish and make sure that they understand that if they get out of it without completing it they will have to start over. We want people to go through the entire course at one time without having to set up an account and the course should take no more than an hour and a half to complete. Once completed, the last page congratulates them for completion and requests their first and last name. Once their name is inputted then they can download a completion certificate to either print out or to email the certificate to themselves. The certificate will have their name on it. If the citizen wants they can print a copy to put in their glove compartment in their vehicle. If they ever get stopped by DeSoto police for a basic traffic violation then they can show the officer their certificate along with their identification. This will let the officer know that the citizen went above and beyond to learn about interacting with law enforcement and as long as it is not an egregious violation for the traffic stop the officer should thank them for taking the time to take the course, let them know how to correct their oversight, (such as telling them to slow down), and telling them to have a nice day. This is a way for the citizens to partner with our law enforcement in keeping everyone safe by being more aware of the rules.

Improve the Family Unit

Concerns: Our city population is majority women. This means that there are a high number of single women. This means that our city’s population is not balanced correctly. It’s not the women’s fault, it’s just numerically not enough men in DeSoto.

Solutions: If we implement my DeSoto Economics First platform this by default will attract more “quality” guys that are looking to better themselves into DeSoto. We in turn need to have more social events specifically for singles. The single events need to be grouped by their age decades such as the singles in their 20’s, 30’s, 40’s and 50+. This gives us the best chance of good match-ups. The singles events need to be strategic where it is “wholesome” such as game nights, meet-ups at events, interactive fun things, etc. Not meeting up at bars. We want to attract men who are looking to start families not to just play around and wreak havoc on our ladies. When we merge our quality single ladies with quality single guys that are looking for steady relationships the magic happens and the city gets more family units thus stabilizing our community more. We need to support more singles matching businesses here in DeSoto. Maybe some of the churches, mosques and synagogues can get involved with this initiative as well.

Activities for our Young Adults

Concerns: Our young adults between the ages of 18-25 that do not go off to college do not have many things to do in DeSoto. Because of this it increases the chances of them either getting in trouble or moving out of DeSoto to an area with more things to do for them.

Solutions: The trade schools will be for whoever wants to enroll. Implementing singles mixers for their age group. After hours dance parties at the Town Hall basketball gym for their age group with ID’s being checked for DeSoto residents only. At least one commercially zoned plot of land should be dedicated for the use catering to this age group. No building permit should be granted for this specific plot of land unless it is built for this purpose.

Life Preparedness for our High School Students in Need

Concern: Since there is a high number of single-parent households in DeSoto, typically being the mother, then a lot of the high school aged children in these households are missing some basic life lessons that a father figure or male figure in the household would normally provide. This causes an unknowing imbalance for these children. Both boys and girls are affected however the girls in these situations normally fare better than the boys. Sometimes the boys in these situations get into trouble or drop out of high school. We must strive to have every high school student graduate and with a clean record. This will give our newest adults the best chance to get their start in life.

Solutions: Since the beginning of civilizations, stable tribes and communities would have a coming-of-age or rites-of-passage for their children once they become of age for adulthood. During this instructional period, whether it was a few days or a few weeks or more, the child would be taught by their older family members and elders of their tribe or community. If it was a boy then he would be taught by the males, if it was a girl then she would be taught by the females. They would teach them in a crash course of the things they needed to know for adulthood to become a man or to become a woman. Once their instructional period was over then the tribe would have a celebratory ceremony to present them to the tribe or community as an official adult that is ready for adulthood. Some cultures call the ceremony bar mitzvah, bat mitzvah, quinceanera, quince anos, sweet sixteen, etc. All cultures in DeSoto need to implement this for their children. This creates well-rounded young adults as they transition into adulthood whether or not they were raised in a single parent household. Each culture needs to be celebrated when they continue this tradition for their children. Children who go through these normally have better self esteem and clarity for the rest of their lives creating more well-rounded citizens. Since each culture is slightly different then these programs should be set up in the private sector by each culture as they see fit but should be highly encouraged and celebrated by the City Council.

A message to the Divine Nine CLICK HERE