Following a smear campaign targeting his sexuality and HIV status, Kristopher Sharp came out victorious in UHD's election for student body vice president.

Before Kristopher Sharp even knew the final results of this month's student body vote at the University of Houston-Downtown, he learned that there was a petition circulating that was already demanding an election recall. The petition was simply the latest move in a remarkably vicious smear campaign against Sharp, a third-year social work major, who was seeking a place in the student body government along with Isaac Valdez.

Sharp had already had to deal with an as-yet-unidentified individual peppering the campus with flyers highlighting Sharp's HIV-positive status. "DON'T SUPPORT THE Isaac and Kris HOMOSEXUAL AGENDA," they read. But not only did the flyers out Sharp's health situation, they also pasted his medical records on the back of the papers, allowing the 14,000-strong student body a glimpse into a part of their peer's life that no one should have had. Graffiti later pockmarked bathroom stalls, urging students to avoid voting for the students who would bring "AIDS" to campus.

Now, during the weeklong vote, the pre-emptive petition began making the rounds. It was the latest salvo in the dirtiest election the campus had likely ever seen.

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Sen. Dan Patrick has finally put an end to the anti-American, pro-Islam lessons in 900 Texas school districts

Months after becoming one of the favored bogeymen among certain right-wing circles, it appears CSCOPE, as a lesson framework used in nearly 900 school districts around the state, is no more. State Sen. Dan Patrick held a press conference Monday morning announcing that he had received a letter from the Texas Education Service Center Curriculum Collaborative alerting him that they would cancel CSCOPE lesson plans at this Friday's meeting.

"The era of CSCOPE lesson plans has come to an end," Patrick, the chair of the Senate Education Committee, said at Monday's press conference. "At the end of the day, I think this is the best move forward...for our students, for our parents, and for our teachers...This was a program that had issues within the content of the lesson plans that brought concerns to parents and legislators and teachers as well as part of the business operations behind it."

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Any high school student in Houston will, or should, automatically know one of the biggest colleges to get into is Texas A&M. That is, if you have the money or the scholarships to afford the tuition and fees.

In recent years, what's been attracting a lot of attention at any school in the country is those fees, used as backdoor ways to hike a student's bill. Increasingly, students and their parents are questioning what they're really paying for with fees. It turns out that sometimes not even the school knows -- and in this case, A&M certainly doesn't seem to.

The audit for the 2012 fiscal year from A&M's flagship school found flaws in justifying the $28 million spent in course fees -- in fact, auditors could not find any documentation for 83 percent of the fees charged students.

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Tomorrow's a half-billion-dollar day.

Tomorrow's another big day for the Lone Star College System as it seeks to persuade voters that it needs a bunch more money -- $497.7 million -- to expand its facilities and who cares about those old Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board projections anyway?

Well some people do and they say this entire bond issue is a waste of time and money and that instead the college system ought to think about better use of the space it already has.

Currently holding at 78,000 students -- 90K if you factor in the non-credit and community education students according to Laura Morris Lone Star's Associate Vice Chancellor, Marketing & Communication -- Lone Star needs to expand to be able to service students face-to-face, Morris argues.

And any suggestion that employing more online courses to cut down on classroom needs is absolutely not the right way to go, Morris says. (Bucking a trend seen elsewhere in the country and in the Houston area.)

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Tony Diaz's Librotraficantes helped to defeat the bills that would have limited what public universities could offer to meet history requirements.

When Tony Diaz first walked up to the State Capitol last month, he had to pause. The man -- normally so well-regarded, so well-spoken -- was, of all things, tense. He'd never given testimony at such level. He'd never gone to the mat with state legislators. He'd never put his beliefs and his efforts on such a stage.

"I had to pause -- I was a little nervous," Diaz, who helps run the activist Librotraficantes organization, told Hair Balls. "You're going to be sparring intellectually with state representatives, so let's see how it is."

Diaz was appearing at the Capitol to attempt to dissuade legislators from moving forward with HB1938. That bill, sponsored by Rep. Giovanni Capriglione and paired with Sen. Dan Patrick's SB1128 in the Texas Senate, was seeking to restrict the types of classes that would meet public university history requirements in Texas. Instead of allowing Chicano, women's and African-American history classes to continue as courses fulfilling such requirements, those bills attempted to force students into either "comprehensive" or Texas-based history courses.

The move is similar to recent attempts seen in Arizona, which the Houston-based Librotraficantes have spent the last few years fighting. But while they've achieved certain successes there, their largest concern remained in Texas.

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Morgan Sisk, right, attempted to take a simple photo with this magazine cover -- but her principal wanted to silence discussion of gay rights on campus.

Updated with comments from Sundown Superintendent Mike Motheral and Murray Lipp, who runs Gay Marriage USA's Facebook site.

On Wednesday morning, an eighth grader at Sundown Middle School approached Morgan Sisk, a senior at Sundown's high school. The 1,400-strong town, located just west of Lubbock, is small enough that the students of all ages pass by one another with regularity, so it wasn't an entire surprise when the tween struck up a conversation with Sisk.

However, this eighth-grader wasn't looking for any form of educational advice. Rather, she wanted to share a bit of thanks, with a personal twist.

"This eighth-grader came up to me and she was like, 'I completely agree with what you're doing,'" Sisk told Hair Balls. "Then she said, 'The principal told me I should probably not let anybody at school know I'm bisexual.'...I've heard some instances of stuff like that before, where they tell people they should probably just save that stuff when you're not at school."

Stuff. Their sexuality. Their identity. As ingrained in them as their height or hair color. Something, according to Sisk, that the administration has encouraged remain hidden while students are on school grounds.

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Dereon Kelley: Writes of his innocence to hometown newspaper.

Kids, if you're thinking of getting out of that final you never studied for by phoning in a bomb threat to the school, think again.

Dereon Tayronne Kelley, 22, may not have been trying to miss a test, but he communicated a bomb threat to Texas Southern University Texas State University last October, a federal jury found, and the judge ordered him to prison for 33 months. Almost three years, with three years of close supervision upon his release, for essentially a single bomb threat.

The Bryan man was also ordered to pay a $300 fine and pay $15,548.93 in restitution.

It could have been worse in these post-9/11, post-Boston Marathon days -- he could have gotten ten years. So there's that. Not to mention that he's also been accused of following up his Texas State threat with one to A&M, although he's not been convicted of that.

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via Wikipedia

Afterwards, I'll show you where the unemployment line is located!

The four years (or maybe more) of being inside an institution that has probably cost you sleep and forced you to mutilate your liver with alcohol is finally coming to end. You're going to be graduating!

(Cue the Vitamin C song.)

Everyone is going to be there! It's going to be the day that your parents won't fight back any tears as they watch their baby boy or baby girl take his or her first steps into adulthood. It would be a shame if something went wrong...

Right?

Here's a top-four list of things not to do before you walk for graduation.

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Photos by Brazos County Sheriiff's Office

Gig `em, Reggie

College footballer with weed -- you're thinking Mack Brown's Longhorns, right?

Forget it -- we're talking Aggies. Former Aggies. Former Aggies like quarterback Reggie McNeal, currently a Canadian Football League free agent. Currently a CFL free agent who keeps getting arrested for weed.

McNeal was arrested recently for marijuana possession in Bryan, thereby offering proof to our theory that you don't want to smoke dope with him. Here are five reasons why:

5. You will get arrested.
This marked the second time in just four months that McNeil has been arrested for marijuana. That is either some dumb bad luck ir dumb bad behavior.

For the second time in four months. That's UT Style, baby.

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via Wikipedia

The M.D. Anderson Library at UH, only filled up during finals week!

Oh finals week, the time of year when students turn into zombies and energy drink companies make a killing. Some students aspire to do the bare minimum to squeeze out a C, some are going frantic trying to maintain their A. However, this is the week where all students kick themselves, asking themselves if they could've done more so they wouldn't be going paranoid about their final grade.

The answer is yes. Here's a list of the top six regrets students have come finals week.

6. Spending too much time on Facebook and Twitter
It's funny how social media has consumed the lives of students. What's more important, paying attention in class or making sure your homegirl knows that the cookies she baked look soooooooo good? At the beginning of the year, it's the latter. Right now? Probably the former.

It's gotten to the point that Facebook and Twitter have become a necessary crutch to briefly escape from studying or paying attention in class. It becomes a brief break, turned into four hours of lollygagging.

Or, you can tell your friends and favorite celebrities to stop being interesting. Problem solved.

5. Writing illegible notes
You could be the best student in the world, always showing up to class, always asking the best questions, etc. But, when you're absorbing every word and transcribing it to your notebook as fast as you can, you may ask yourself when you're studying for finals, "What the fuck did I just write?"

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