Many of us are members of various organizations. Sometimes resolutions, proposal and motions are made that frustrates us and we fail to agree with the idea of the proposal’s intended outcome.
Our first response is to say with intensity and high emotions, “I don’t like it, and I will not vote for the proposal. We say, “I will let my voice be heard by voting ‘no’.”

That is indeed the correct action, when you do not want to allow the issue to surface again. Your opinion has been duly noted with your “no” vote recorded.
Stop!

However, instead of voting “no” out of your distaste for the proposal, when you know that your action will not be on the prevailing side.

If you understand parliamentary procedure, the standard rules that governs most organizations, you will know to downsize your emotions and vote strategically by voting for the action that you do not like.

When you vote on the prevailing side of the motion that you do not like, you will have the opportunity at some future time to bring up the issue again.

An example of such has occurred at the Houston Independent School District Board of Education. No, the above description of the strategy is not the reason HISD has brought the closing of Dotson Elementary School back to the table for a second look, it is there however, because of the voting on the prevailing side rule.

What has returned the closing of Dodson Elementary School to the table has been the activism and citizen participation.

The arguments that parents and citizens are putting forth are the merits of maintaining the elementary school as a neighborhood resource rather than use it as a site for shifting uses of the school building for the District other than teaching small children.

Learning the lesson of political strategy though the use of a current event example should help as we manage our lives going forward.

Closing neighborhood schools should be a concern of all at multiple levels and layers.

It is not just about the children today. It has the safety concerns for small children walking to and from schools. It has housing value variable.

The school building and play ground is a community resource beyond teaching children and providing a play ground for the current students. It should become also used as green space for children to play and where families can fight obesity.
The list continues as far as your imagination for productive use can take you as the state law allows for public use beyond educating the children after regular classes are over.

Specific to the upcoming HISD Board meeting this week, it has
been reported that the Board of Regent who represents Dodson Elementary School is not scheduled to be present on that day of the resurging vote.

Maybe the citizens can do what they can to persuade Regent Paula Harris to change her plans and come to table to cast an affirmative vote for the children of Dodson Elementary School which also is a vote for the zoned middle school and ultimately Jack Yates High School.

Also citizens, we need to learn the difference between the words trustee and representative and gain and understanding of what the actualization of these terms mean in the electoral process.
May God bless and I will see you next week.

Through Dorris Eyes:

With March 31 as the deadline for the nation to sign-up for health care, the government and private medical firms are working trying to snag and reel in the procrastinators to attach the late comers to their company while the government just want the nation’s citizens to just register.

The health coverage for each individual is important. Having recently experienced more than 15 years of family members being ill, care givers began to establish baseline knowledge about the medical system. Yes, there are many short comings, but the knowledge of those requiring the need for such services are even greater. The public heath sector of our government need to do a better job of engaging the health consumer public on several factors:
1. prevention- identify 20 of the most common health problems and then specific spell out the ways that could possibly be prevented.

2. Warning Signs for specific medical problems and

3. Care tips for identified common health problems.

As the clock ticks on the Affordable Health Care Act registration, citizens are facing penalties if they do not self-enroll so that they will not uninsured. The minority community is not the focus of the nationwide push to get people signed-up. Special focus is on the Texas Latino community. In Texas it is estimated that there are 3.5 million Hispanics who are uninsured.

Nationally, 32 percent of Latinos are uninsured and 16 percent of the non-Latinos.

Health disparities are serious enough for all citizens to stop and focus. For these health disparites leads to illness and death. The access and use of health care services can reduce our exposure to risks. One’s behavior and also reduce the risk factors for disease along with environmental hazards and social determinants according to 2012 Center for Disease Report.

The identification of diseases and risk factors are essential to the improvement of one’s health for knowledge is power. The 2013 CDC report on Disparities Examined states that the latest report looks at disparities in deaths and illness, use of health care, behavioral risk factors for disease, environmental hazards, and social determinants of health at the national level.

This year’s report contains 10 new topics including activity limitations due to chronic diseases, asthma attacks, fatal and nonfatal work-related injuries and illnesses, health-related quality of life, periodontitis in adults, residential proximity to major highways, tuberculosis, access to healthier foods, and unemployment.

Report Supports National Disparities Elimination Efforts: The information provided in the report is of vital importance in achieving the goals of Healthy People 2020 and the National Partnership for Action (NPA) to End Health Disparities .

CDC’s report also complements the annual National Healthcare Disparities Report and the periodicreports related to Healthy People 2020. When we review the report and learn, we will become more excited about why each of us is in need of health care.

May God bless and I will see you next week.

Through Dorris’s Eyes:

On the year that the first African-American Woman Elected to Congress Joins Popular Black Heritage Stamp Series, U.S. Postal Service Honors Shirley Chisholm, the US Postal Services attempts to move the communities of the nation backward, instead of forward.

The continuous threats to close post offices located in minority neighborhood is evidence that the quality of life returns to a downward directions going back to days of the past, when African Americans neighborhoods were not provided the equal quality of service. When our nation’s service providers take one step forward then retrench to one step backward, the gains that were made are not sustainable nor do we provide access to the residents of the area.

The closing of the Southmore Post Office Station, 4110 Almeda Rd. in Houston, TX 77004 meets the needs of a growing community that is becoming a crossover again as the racial diversity increases. Yet, the predominate customer-base is African Americans and with your announcement of this closure, it become a critical matter of taking another resource from the community and the small business owners like myself.

For the past 30 years, my company and my family have relied upon the Southmore station for all my postal needs from letters to shipping to subscriptions to invoices and regular business-to-business services. This proposed closure places another strain on my small business which would require more time and fuel to get the same job accomplished that I have been doing for 30-years.

My request in this letter is to keep the Southmore Station open and find additional revenue sources that would make the location produce additional revenue and services to the community. This request joins many voices of which we have reported on as a community newspaper. It is unacceptable to merely have memories, we need services within the community that improves the quality of life for its residents.

The commemorative stamps should not become the only legacy to US Post Offices in African, poor and rural community. We the people still expect the delivery of service from the postal service. It is one of the first governmental entities that opened its public doors and grated African Americans the opportunity to move into the middle class with benefits and privileges.

America, we cannot go backward. Forward, it must be. It is essential to hear and listened to the voices of the residents by those we elect for real, not grandstanding with speeches and photo ops. We must have sound action on the floor of Congress so that we residents can get positive outcomes at home.

May God bless and I will see you next week.

Through Dorris’s Eyes:

Why should the citizenry be concerned about the closing of schools? Some citizens have not given school a thought since leaving. Others only think about schools at tax times whereas, others only think about schools when there is a problem or a major disruption that flashes repeatedly in the media.

Schools for African Americans were forbidden and inaccessible in our past, just 150 years ago. Quality schools were even more rare coming out of enslavement. When it came to measuring competencies against a national norm expectations were not there for excellence for we know why we were in such a predicament. Schools, we must understand has many purposes. It can be labeled the cornerstone of a community. When our education has told us what a cornerstone and the value of one, then we may begin to understand the core value of schools and easy access to education.

Back in the day as noted earlier, a school house was left to the black church where communities who sought to improve supported the schools thinking that through education communities would improve and therefore, the quality of life would be better for future generations.

What does an improved quality of life bring to a community without the responsibility of what to do with those individual improvements? Why should educators and parents labor in the vineyard and see no benefit or very little yield from their labor? Well, America and Houston specifically, we have a problem that has revisited itself from the past.

When young parents move into a neighborhood, realtors taut the schools in the community. Parents are actually given the “feeder” pattern for your address to the cornerstone. Parents are told the names of the elementary, middle and high school your child is zoned to attend. Realtors even tell parents that the school district even offer options for parents to opt out of sending the children to their zoned school and that they can research charter, and special academic public schools.

What parents are facing today is triple fold as it usually is for parents: limited budget, limited amount of time to stay on top of all matters relating to the children’s education and limited knowledge of the rules and regulations of the public education bureaucracy. To make the matters worse, the elected school board officials are not there to represent the needs of the families within the district form which they were elected. Why not you ask, probably in quite a perturb manner? They are elected as trustees, which means that they work to do what they feel to be in the best interest of the school district as a whole.

To be Continued Next Week Until Then…
May God bless and I will see you next week.

Walter T. Brooks did not have childhood aspirations of becoming a firefighter.

However, when Brooks heard the Houston Fire Department was seeking African Americans to integrate their stations, he applied, knowing he had a wife and two small children and needed steady work.

In 1955, the City of Houston annexed Clinton Park, a predominantly black neighborhood located in east Houston. Prior to this, Clinton Park had an all-volunteer fire station operated by blacks. With the annexation, city officials wanted the station’s equipment and building but not the volunteer firefighters. This was intolerable to many of Clinton Park’s residents.

Consequently, under then-mayor Roy Hofheinz, an end soon came to segregation of the Houston Fire Department with the city seeking to hire African Americans.

“I needed a steady job,” said Brooks. “I wasn’t thinking about making history.”

Out of nearly 1, 000 applicants, 10 black men, including Brooks, were chosen as the first African Americans to participate in firefighter training. The others were Clifford Thompson, Samuel Kemp, James Perry, Willie Bright, Garnet C. Young, Milton Alford, John Hayes, W. D. Cooper and Alfo Craven.

Brooks, 90, joined the fire department after serving in the Navy for three years and going to vocational school on the GI Bill.  He was a government employee, shipping ammunition to Korea, when he heard of the firefighter openings.  Brooks decided to apply for a position because he was concerned about government cutbacks and job security.

“I didn’t know how long I’d be working under the government ordinance,” said Brooks. “I had been reduced in salary two or three different times. The fire department was somewhere where you potentially could never be laid off. I was most interested in a job that would support my family.”

We are woman and hear us roar! We are liberated, independent, educated, and
working while being mommy and wife. The modern woman is no longer Suzy
Homemaker but Susan the CEO or Susan the PhD or better yet Susan I make my own
rules.
There was a time when women were told to be pretty, nice and find a good
husband that will take good care of them, but times have changed the marriage rate is
down and women have to take care of themselves and their children.
Educated, smart, witty and good looking are no longer just adjectives that
describe Mr. Right but it also is the new face of the millennium woman.
I consider myself an example of the new age woman. At a young age I helped
raise a child while attending school, interning, and working two part-time jobs. I pursued
my degrees with vigor while still maintaining a child. The new age woman has to be
tenacious and use all her resources to keep a float in a “man’s world”.
But I beg to differ that women are lagging in any way as the statistics are showing
women are becoming more educated and are flocking to the high powered positions more
than ever.

Education
Women are sweeping men in enrolling in college and completing. 44% of women
ages 18-24 enrolled in college and graduate programs as of 2010, compared to the 38%
of men in the same age group. 36% of women 25-29 years old had a bachelor’s degree
compared to the 28% of men which is a record his since the early 90’s. (Pew Research)
Ambition
Due to an increase in education and degrees what would keep a women from
becoming the business partner or career woman that was always dreamt of? Young
women are surpassing young men in the importance they put on having a high paying
career or profession in 2012, according to the Pew Research Center. Two- thirds (66%) of
young women ages 18 to 34 rate career high on their list of priorities compared to 59% of
young men. This can also be compared to the 56% of women and 58% of men in 1997.
Labor Force
In an era where women love designer wear more than ever and feel they deserve it
regardless of their socioeconomic class they have abandoned the Young and the Restless,
Bon-Bons and home to join the labor force in droves. In 2010, women made up almost
half of the labor force at 46.7% compared to the 46.2% in 1997 and 38.1% in 1970. (Pew
Research)
Marriage
Now the saying goes “every girl dreams of her wedding day” and it’s most likely
true because I know I sure have but that doesn’t mean marriage is off the table when
career is an objective as well. Trend is showing that young adults are marrying at lower
rates and at later ages than previous years. 33% of 18-34 year old women are married in
2012 compared to the three- fourths (73%) of women in the same age group in 1960.

But married women are not necessary forced to be barefoot and pregnant in modern times
as 48% of married couples in 2010 consist of two paychecks compared to the 34% in
1975. (Pew Research)

Children
My mother was a working mother and I speak in past tense since she is fully
retired at 54 years old, my sister is a working mother and a school teacher which makes
her a mother to many while working at the same time. I’ve had the pleasure of working
closely with an entrepreneur, philanthropist and teacher who is a mother of four while
being a mentor to many. The job never ends for a woman who has children but it also
makes it imperative that she brings in some source of revenue even if there is already a
money base in the home. More than 7 in 10 mothers with children at home are working.
For mothers 18 and younger that is already working rose form 47% in 1975 to 71% in
2010. Mothers with children younger than six in the labor force is slightly lower at 64%
than a mother whose children are 6 to 17 years old at 77%.

The dynamic of the woman is changing to meet the needs of the world. Women
are the nurturer, the bearers of life so we must evolve in order to stay purposeful. We are
leaders, we are no longer just behind the scenes anymore; we are out in front. We are
earning and providing for our families and for self. Women have come a long way since
the Women’s Suffrage movement of the 1920’s. With those rights and liberties we are
able to be wives, mothers, friends and a worker in any industry. Are we roaring loud
enough?