Houston News Blog

​Attention gamers: If you find yourself overflowing with hatred and killing your virtual teammates when you're supposed to be helping them, you might want to reconsider that Grand Dragon of the Knights of White Purity avatar -- a new study out of UT suggests that your online persona can affect how you play with others in a virtual world.

Proving once again how totally necessary and non-ridiculous academia is, Assistant Communications Professor Jorge Pena randomly assigned study participants avatars "wearing physician or Ku Klux Klan-like uniforms," or white- and dark-cloaked avatars.

After the people with the KKK avatars finished burning crosses in Zilker Park (not really), all participants were told to write a story about a picture or play online with a team.

Can you guess where this is going?

​The KIPP charter schools in Houston are getting a huge boost from Bill Gates, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced that it is guaranteeing $30 million worth of bonds so that KIPP can expand operations here "from 4,500 in 15 schools to 21,000 students in 42 schools in the next decade," the paper reported.

KIPP will be responsible for paying back the money to lenders, but the fact that the Gates Foundation is saying it will pay if KIPP fails to means the organization can get a much better deal from lenders. It could save $10 million over the 35-year life of the bonds, and it lets the Gates Foundation spread the wealth without (they hope) actually putting any money out there.

KIPP has long been held out -- despite some occasional mild criticism -- as a model for charter schools nationwide.

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Pam McLaurin is a teacher in Big Sandy ISD in Polk County in deep East Texas. The Texas Education Association has asked her to submit to a background check. McLaurin, who has taught for 20 years, has complied with every part of the check save for the mandatory fingerprinting, which she opposes on religious grounds.

That's because the kindergarten teacher interprets the Book of Revelation literally, and thus fears that by allowing her fingerprint to be digitized and stored in a computer, she will have assumed the Mark of the Beast.

Photo courtesy The Battalion

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Some Aggies got upset with our interpretation of President George H.W. Bush's open letter to them saying "Chill out, brosephs, when Obama comes to town."

Now the President is in town, and how are they doing?

You can follow along at The Battalion, the campus paper, which is offering all kinds of live coverage of the event, which is designed to promote volunteerism (and Marxism, we have to assume.)

The paper reports 600 protesters have shown up at Spence Park in College Station, and another 250 on campus.

Their slideshow, which includes the picture above, is here.

​President Obama is headed to College Station Friday, at the invitation of former President George H.W. Bush, to speak about community service and whatnot.

Obama, having already spoken at Notre Dame earlier this career, apparently decided to find an even more hostile environment. (Next stop: Bob Jones University! Then Al-Qaeda headquarters and then, The Woodlands.)

Bush obviously is hoping very much for a polite, respectful reception for Obama in Aggieland. He also has a pretty good idea of just how popular the president likely is on campus.

So he's written an open letter to the A&M student body, essentially telling them "Hey, you and me both know this guy is leading us towards Stalinist concentration camps, but for just one day try to forget that he is the Anti-Christ."

He doesn't quite use that language, of course. In fact, you have to read between the lines to find the desperate pleading from the former president:

​On one side: A 16-year-old kid who a) actually a solid-enough citizen to have a job already, and b) loves the memory of his grandma who died from cancer, and c) would like to grow his hair long enough to donate it to Locks of Love, which helps cancer patients dealing with chemo-caused hair loss/

On the other side: A small East Texas school district that apparently thinks long hair on boys is communist or something. Or at least leads to communism, or socialism, or voting for Obama.

Beaumont station KFDM has the story of Silsbee teen Jarrot Griffis, who has been told to cut that damn hair, hippie, by the Silsbee school district.

Silsbee ISD, here is what you're up against:

"If I could give my hair to somebody else and see them with my hair and them smile, that would be meaningful," said Griffis.

Something even more meaningful to Griffis, his aunt is a breast cancer survivor, but he's lost three family members to cancer, including his best friend.

"It tore me up inside when my grandma died," said Griffis.

In your defense, Silsbee ISD, long hair is kinda gay. We guess.

​Here's a letter no high school principal wants to write: "Hey parents! One of our teachers was getting it on with a student. Oh and, hey, you know, while I've got your attention and everything, one of our other teachers is being investigated for the same thing. Go Lions!!!"

That's not quite the wording that Spring High principal Donna Ullrich used, but we guess you have to be a little more nuanced in getting bad news out.

Ullrich informed parentsin "an URGENT letter" that Spring science teacher Deanna Higgins (pictured, via KHOU; let the inappropriate comments begin!) had been charged with having sex with "improper relationship between an educator and a student, and one for sexual assault of a child. Both charges are second-degree felonies."

The gender of the student was not specified, but we're guessing it's either male or female.

Ullrich wasn't done with her news, though:

​It's hard out there for a pimped-out student housing facility.

We reported back in May that UH was having trouble leasing rooms in Calhoun Lofts, the deluxe dorms intended for grad students to live in (as well as dance, take cooking lessons, do yoga and reach the summit of Maslow's hierarchy of needs). This was troubling for the university, since the lofts -- with a debt service of $7.2 million a year for 30 years -- are the most expensive capital project in UH System history, according to VP for Student Affairs Elwyn C. Lee.

On May 1 this year, The Division of Student Affairs held a meeting about the situation, telling a group of UH employees that applications had been filed for only 25 percent of the rooms. When we made some calls May 8, UH officials told us that number had jumped to 60 percent. (To break even, the facility needed to be about 95 percent full.)

Despite that weekend's phenomenal -- dare we say, unbelievable -- jump in applications, occupancy is now around the 60 percent mark. As of this week, 647 of 984 beds were occupied in the facility.

​Yesterday we mentioned how the Memorial-Stratford high school football rivalry had gained national attention because of an obscene t-shirt that got shown on some women's websites like Jezebel.

The t-shirt showed two Mustangs (Memorial's mascot) having sex with a Stratford cheerleader while high-fiving.

Luckily, current and former students from both schools responded in a way that did Texas proud, if by "proud" you mean "living up to every brain-dead caricature the nation has about Texas."

Five things we learned from the comments section, from e-mails and from conversations about the shirt:

1. The shirt included some witty wordplay.  "Memorial Towers Over Stratford," it said. We subsequently discovered that two guys high-fiving each other, while one has oral sex with a woman while the other bangs her from behind, is called an 'Eiffel Tower."

We didn't know this because we've never touched another dude while having sex BECAUSE IT'S SO GAY. As the funny guys at Memorial would no doubt add, "not that there's anything wrong with that."

​Memorial High, the west-side bastion of education for suburbanites, is riling up the women at the website Jezebel.

And with good reason.

Someone sent the site a t-shirt apparently produced for their annual game with Stratford: It features two horses (Memorial's teams are the Mustangs) having sex with a woman wearing a fairy or elf costume. What that has to do with the Stratford Spartans, we're not sure, but in case the message isn't clear the shirt reads "Memorial Towers Over Stratford: F'n Spartans Up Since 1962." (Update: We're told the elf-like attire is what Stratford cheerleaders wear. So that's nice.)

The lithe blonde woman pictured, in case you don't want to click through to the link, is orally servicing one horse while getting it doggie-style from the other. (It sounds so much more classier when you describe it.)

Spring Branch ISD spokesman Steven Brunsman was completely unaware of the shirt, or any controversy that might be attached to it, until we sent him the link from Jezebel.

He said he'll see what he can find out -- whether it's just a single shirt, or something that the school or other officials are aware of and have punished, etc.

Jezebel commenters, of course, are already weighing in.

​Texas A&M University created an architectural award this year, the Spirit of Place medal, "envisioned as becoming one of the world's premier built-environment awards," according to a press release from the school.

The university wants its new award to be "viewed in the same light" as the Stirling Prize, awarded by the Royal Institute of British Architects. Recent winners of that award include the Museum of Modern Literature in Germany, the Scottish Parliament building and the Gherkin, a skyscraper in London.

So to cement its place in the world of high-brow architecture, A&M has awarded the inaugural Spirit of Place medal to Jerry Jones. Yes, owner of the Dallas Cowboys Jerry Jones, for his "significant contributions to the built environment" with the "design and construction of Cowboys Stadium."

"The idea of doing an award like this has been floating around for a long time," Lane Stephenson, a spokesman for Texas A&M, tells Hair Balls. "Bryan Trubey, a graduate of our university [Class of 1983], was the designer of the stadium. That kind of put the stadium on our radar."

​Norm Uhl, spokesperson for the Houston school district, sent out this e-mail blast today:

This week HISD launched Parent Student Connect, an online service that allows parents and students to check their grades, progress reports, attendance, report cards, etc. Before we launched it districtwide, we did a test run with parents at Lamar High School, so if you are interested in doing a story, we should be able to find you a parent who has used the system.

Hey, we thought to ourselves. We're a Lamar parent. And we haven't heard a damn thing about this system.

Sure, every teacher at Open House mentioned it would eventually be coming, but there was no talk of "test runs" or anything like that.

What's up, Norm?

"It was a limited trial over the summer," he said. "Was your student in summer school?"

Well, yes, he was. And we heard nothing about it.

We decided we had better interview ourselves.

​You can argue whether Houston-area high schools do a good job educating kids, but there's one thing you can't argue -- they do a hell of a job turning out NFL players.

That's the finding reached by USA Football, the non-profit group that serves as a governing body for youth and amateur football.

The organization looked at NFL rosters as of the opening weekend, the high schools that players had listed as graduating from, and came to the conclusion: Houston kicks ass.

Not as much ass as Miami, but a lot more than Dallas.

Miami high schools have 31 alumni playing in the NFL; Houston's have 23 and Dallas' a mere dozen. (Even Detroit, with 15, outshines Dallas.)

​The Texas chapter of the ACLU, perhaps the most socialistically communistic group outside of the Obama administration, has released its annual report on attempts to ban books in schools.

The bad news: HISD tied for second in the state in the number of challenged books. The good news: The number of challenges dropped dramatically, from 20 last year to a half-dozen this year. (The leader was Stephenville, with 11 challenged books.)

We'll give you the list of HISD challenges after the jump, but it's noteworthy that the ACLU had some harsh criticism for the way the district goes about hearing challenges.

"In this key district," the ACLU said, "we discovered what is safe to call a complete failure in policy, record-keeping and government transparency. When asked to provide records of their review committee hearings and membership roles, representatives of HISD were forced to admit that no such records are kept."

(We're getting a response from HISD and will update.)

​We warned you Monday that the State Board of Education was webcasting its meetings, and hilarity was likely to ensue.

It didn't take long today to prove that right.

Who's laughing at us? Talking Points Memo. Gawker. And probably every left-of-center blog out there, before the night is over.

Why? As TPM put it:

Before the board turned to social studies, the hearing got to an odd start when an animated member of the public testifying about the importance of health education declared, "I'm 56 years old and I'm a virgin." The chair promptly warned her to stay on topic.

Hey, she was just talking about abstinence!! (Then we can dig it.)

Aldine finally says "You like me!! You really like me!!"

​Dewey Beats Truman, or something: Aldine ISD is no longer the perennial best loser in the prestigious Broad Prize for urban education.

The Susan Lucci of school districts has been a finalist for the award three of the past six years without ever winning. When there are only five finalists a year, that's gotta hurt.

This year the announcement was broadcast live on the web, so board members and administrators gather to watch who would get the $1million in scholarships.

"The decibel level really went up when we heard," district spokesman Mike Keeney tells Hair Balls.

Did they have any inkling this would be the year?

​TP-ing the dean's house, frat brothers hazing pledges, people getting some strange after the football team's upset victory. These are some of the most sacred and time-honored college traditions, and Houston Community College would like its pupils to live them.

Now HCC can't guarantee that you'll get paddled by the Kappa Omega Kappa boys. They won't even guarantee that you'll get lucky. They do, however, hope to provide students with that huge upset victory.

How? HCC is looking into creating an athletics program. Currently, the six member colleges host their own intramural and club-level sports. A little known fact, however, is that HCC is a member of the National Junior College Athletics Association. With that membership, HCC could develop intercollegiate sports programs to compete in Region 14.

"I think within the next two to three years, we will be a member of that conference," said Dr. William Harmon, president of HCC Central College. "The problem is that we need someone to coordinate all of these activities, not only for intramurals and club sports, but someone who would be responsible for the development of athletics. So we would need someone, who for lack of a better title, who would be an athletics director."

Photo courtesy White House Flickr group

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Last week we told you about the Arlington school district, which refused to show President Obama's "stay in school" speech but was fine with busing hundreds of students to Cowboys Stadium to hear George W. Bush.

It sounded odd to us, but then again we don't live in Arlington.

Now, it appears, sanity -- or at least what passes for it up in the Metroplex -- has prevailed.

The district announced today that the field trip to Cowboys Stadium was off. "In retrospect, I can see how the district's decisions concerning these two events could be seen as favoring one event over the other," AISD superintendent Jerry McCullough wrote to parents.

"In retrospect"?

​Television just got a lot more entertaining this week. And we're not talking about the Jay Leno show.

The State Board of Education announced today that it will be televising its committee meetings for the world to see. (A new law requires them to do so, but we like to think it's just civic-mindedness on their part.)

To be pedantic, they won't be on television, per se. But the meetings will be on the Net, which is the next best thing. The kidz don't watch anything unless it's on their computers, anyway!

So what can we look forward to in Wednesday's show? From what Dan Quinn of the Texas Freedom Network tells us, it should be a laff riot!!!

​A while back, the University of Texas announced it would no longer be participating the National Merit Scholarship program, where brainiac students get $13,000 scholarships.

All the stories mentioned that UT said the program cost $4.4 million a year. We had a question about that and e-mailed UT; we never heard back and forgot about it until today. So we called, and eventually got to speak to Thomas Merecki, director of student financial students.

A warning: It was a devilish, F-producing combination of accounting and calculus classes in college that turned us into a largely numbers-free journalist. So our grasp of math, both in the abstract, theoretical sense and the balancing-a-checkbook sense, is tenuous at best.

But here's the question we had: How could this program cost $4.4 million freaking dollars a year?

There's that much bureaucracy involved?

Or, as we thought was more likely, UT is not counting its spending so much as it's counting the tuition money it's not getting from those students, right? It doesn't cost the college anything (or that much, really) to have another student in a class, it's just that the student isn't forking over tuition.

So it's not money going out of UT, it's just not money coming in, and that seems like an accounting trick to us.

Photo courtesy HISD

​The Houston school board plans to vote later today on $121.5 million in school improvements over and above the projects approved in the 2007 bond election.

Because each of the nine trustee districts has exactly the same amount of overcrowding/undercrowding and facilities in need of repair, the tubful of cash will be evenly divided. Each trustee is getting $13.5 million for his or her district.

How are they spending it? Here's what HISD spokesman Norm Uhl says are the highlights:

District I,  Natasha Kamrani: Plans to use $7 million of her funding to provide permanent classroom space for students at the Sam Houston Ninth Grade Academy who are now housed in temporary buildings.

District II, Carol Galloway: Plans to use $2 million for facility, lighting and site upgrades at Kashmere Gardens Elementary School.

District III, Manuel Rodriguez: Plans to use $5 million to convert Bellfort Academy into an early childhood center to provide additional pre-K classroom space. This will provide, he Rodriguez said, "crucial pre-kindergarten education for the communities in the surrounding area."

​The Houston school district provided some anecdotal evidence of how many parents ordered their kids not to watch President Obama's speech on education (Westside represent!!), but we wondered if there was a little more info to be gleaned.

The district put up on its website a link to a form that could be printed, filled out and taken into school. Of course, parents not aware of the online form could probably have simply sent in a note to school officials saying "I'm a closed-minded Fox viewer and Rush fan" and that would have been good enough. Still, we were interested in just how many people -- computer-literate people, mind you -- used the online form.

There's no way to tell exactly -- some people surely looked at it out of curiosity, some media people or even other school districts no doubt looked at it -- but HISD spokesman Norm Uhl was able to give us some stats.

And the bottom line -- the online form got almost 4,000 hits.

Yes, that number has four digits in it.

​Houston, whenever you worry the right-wing loons are making you look bad, take solace in this: There's always Dallas.

North Texas was perhaps the country's capital of the awe-inspiring movement that kept schoolkids from hearing a president speak about staying in school. And the Dallas area played its part.

The Arlington school district, for instance, refused to show Obama's speech, no doubt because it was a partisan attempt at political hackery disrupting the sanctity of the school day.

Too bad Obama didn't offer a trip to a football stadium. That would have made it all okay.

Arlington, it turns out, couldn't let its kids take 15 minutes off to hear Obama, but they can get bused to the Dallas Cowboys' new stadium to hear George W. Bush.

​HISD is releasing some scattered statistics on how many parents sent in "opt-out" forms so their children could remain God-fearing Americans instead of becoming Communist by listening to a president tell them to stay in school.

District spokesman Norm Uhl  says no survey of the district's 300 or so campuses will be conducted, but he has gathered some anecdotal evidence.

"Opt-outs range from none at Carnegie Vanguard, Mading Elementary, Frost Elementary and Thomas Middle School to 300 opt-outs at Westside High School," Uhl said. "Westside has about 3,000 students, so that's 10 percent. I've heard from several schools that only had a handful of opt-outs, such as 20 at Lamar HS which has 3,000 students."

Three hundred or so Westside parents actually demanded their children be taken out of class for the speech? Way to go, Wolves!!

It's too late, parents....Unless you filled out the proper paperwork offering definitive proof you're a right-wing radical blinded by Fox News, your kid is being subjected to the amazing hypnotic power of Barack Obama at this moment.

You can watch here, if you dare.

Will you recognize your kids when they come home? Will their eyes be vacant, their minds full of mushy liberalism, their mouths uttering "Stay in school....stay in school"?

One can only wonder.

We'll update when the speech is over, and things are safe again.

Photo courtesy White House

​Leave it to Texas to add a whole additional layer of idiocy to the cornucopia of idiocy surrounding protests over a President urging kids to stay in school.

Other presidents have given such televised speeches to schools before -- even in Texas -- without any hubbub, but none of those presidents were Communist agents born in Kenya who have incredible mind-melding powers in which they can recruit young children through a TV screen.

School districts and individual schools all over the area are scrambling to try to keep Obama-haters appeased while not looking too insane.

HISD's Norm Uhl tells Hair Balls "alternative learning activities" will be available and "There is absolutely no reason for a parent to keep a child home on Tuesday, since we are accommodating their wishes." (Keep them home for the whole day because of an innocuous speech?! Then again, the kids might be in the building when the speech is televised!! Invisible rays could reach out from the TV!!)

Katy ISD, for instance, sent out a note saying "Allowing parents to opt their children out of listening to our president or any other elected official will be honored as we honor requests of those who desire to opt out of saluting our nation's flag and reciting the pledge of Allegiance."

Fairly reasonable, right? No. It ignited a firestorm.

​You gotta admit this about the right-wing, talk-show-listening, Fox-News-loving one-third of America -- no one can whip up a paranoid kerfluffle like they can.

The latest insidious event causing them to storm the barricades is Barack Obama's Stalin-like plan to hypnotize mass numbers of gullible schoolchildren into becoming mindless slaves of the liberal agenda by telling them to stay in school.

Even the hard, cold fact that Obama intends to kill your grandparents at the first opportunity is taking a back seat to this Master Plan of Indoctrination.

HISD is giving parents the chance to have their kids opt out of listening to the brief speech Obama is broadcasting to schools Tuesday, HISD spokesman Norm Uhl tells Hair Balls. ("The students who are opted out will attend another learning activity during the speech," he says.)

We have to agree that such a strategy on the part of parents is the only sensible thing to do, since Obama makes Beelzebub, The Teller of Lies look like a honest, straighforward guy.

To get to the bottom of this, we entered the scary depths of Talk-Radio World, and spoke with Michael Berry, the former city councilman who's the boss of KTRH, home of Glenn Beck, Hannity, Rush and his own show.

​The University of Houston started this semester requiring students on its book-loan program to purchase text books exclusively from the UH campus bookstore, managed by Barnes & Noble. The College Store, an off-campus bookstore, wasn't too happy about the decision.

We figured that the university made this move to save students money, because, surely, the school could provide textbooks at the lowest prices. So we worked up a random schedule for the fall semester to compare book costs, enrolling in BIOL 1334, COMM 1301, MATH 3331, and SPAN 1501.

Total from Barnes & Noble: $563.80 (new), $422.85 (used); College Store: $536.50 (new), $403 (used). That's only an average savings of $23.75, and even though it's been awhile since Hair Balls was in college, we remember buying a lot of beer for $20.

​Parents applauded this morning after the HISD Board of Trustees was finally able to vote on a $96 million upgrade for seven schools. Board President Larry Marshall, who sets the board's agenda, had for weeks not included the item on the agenda, despite the fact that former superintendent Abe Saavedra promised the schools would be renovated. The schools are Bellaire, Worthing and Sam Houston high schools; Grady Middle School, Lockhart Elementary, Bellfort. The money would also go toward building a new High School for the Performing and Visual Arts.

Marshall had further upset some parents, and at least one other trustee, by only putting three of the seven schools on this morning's agenda. Trustee Harvin Moore reacted yesterday with the following angry Tweet, according to a Chron blog: "The most bizarre power play I have witnessed in six years on the HISD board continues."

But despite Marshall's gripe about the vote being "worthless," it passed 8-1.