By MARY STEWART | The Selma Times-Journal

The Dallas County Extension Cooperative wants the citizens of Selma to give their opinion on upcoming classes.

Callie Nelson, coordinator for the extension, has called on the people in our community to complete an online survey.

“Every year in cooperative extension, we conduct what we call grass roots assessments and meetings, and what that simply means is that we want to know what the program needs are,” Nelson said.

She said the extension uses grass roots meetings as a way to identify the issues that are important to Dallas County citizens.

“By doing this grass roots assessment, we are then able to plan educational programs that will address the needs of the people in the county that we serve.”

This year, the extension will be sending out an online survey in order to reach more citizens.

“In the past, we’ve always held a meeting, or we’ve sent out hard copy surveys and asked people to complete them,” she said. “In order to extend the reach and get more input, we are doing the online survey because people can do them at night or on the weekend. They don’t have to worry about coming to a meeting.”

The extension will bring in a core group of individuals, who they regularly work with, to do an in person grass roots assessment.

“We will be able to merge the two sets of data,” she said. “We will be able to look at people that have never been to a meeting or may not even know what cooperative extension is, what they consider to be some of the keys issues as well as some of the people that are more familiar with extension.”

Nelson said that the survey would be anonymous unless the citizen wants the extension to know their identity.

It takes about 10 minutes, and it will ask you your input in four different areas,” she said.

The categories are agriculture and gardening, family and consumer science, youth development and community resource development.

“If you don’t have a suggestion, or if you don’t want to rate a topic, then you don’t have to,” Nelson said. “You can skip around and do the ones that you prefer to do.”

Nelson and her team said they value the opinions of the citizens of their county and want to encourage participation in the survey.

“We hope everybody will take this opportunity to give us some feedback to let us know what they see as some key needs and issues here in the community.”

The survey can be accessed at www.aces.edu/dallas

It can be found on the left-hand side of the page under the tab that says “Dallas County Citizens Input Needed.”

For more information, contact the Cooperative Extension at 875-3200.