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The George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum opened to the public Wednesday, with the 43rd president greeting 43 area schoolchildren who were its first visitors.

“It was amazing seeing one of our nation’s leaders who left an eight-year legacy behind him,” said Eduardo Borrego, a sixth-grader at Mark Twain Elementary in Richardson. He added, “I was like, ‘I can’t believe he’s here.’”

The Texas Senate approved a new option for troubled schools on Wednesday, advancing a bill that would create a special district operated by turnaround specialists.

“I think this is the right thing to do for the children that are trapped in low-performing schools,” said Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, author of the bill.

Drawing key support across the political aisle from Senate Education Committee Chairman Dan Patrick, R-Houston, the bill passed 26-5. It still must clear the House.

African-American women, students and faculty, came together to discuss a myriad of topics and promote a sense of community.

The discussion, entitled MySister Myself was led on Tuesday night in the Student Union Building Baines room.

MySister MySelf is an event that was started last year by Kim Marmon, a resource specialist for the department of multicultural affairs.

A lecture by Dr. Cornelia Pearsall, professor of English language and literature from Smith College, will be presented from 3:30…

Midland senior Laaron Backry was not always an award winner in the political science field. During her freshman year, Backry was a biology major – a biology major who didn’t like math.

“Ever since I was 8, I dreamed of being a doctor, a surgeon specifically,” Backry said. “And that was what I was going to do and what I was going for, but I got here and I was miserable in science. And then math kicked my butt.”

During a period of indecision, Backry took a class in constitutional development that was suggested by a friend.

Every fall, hundreds of freshman and transfer students arrive to Baylor without knowing how to get around campus. With the redesigned Baylor Campus Navigator app, students can know where to go on campus with free, real-time directions from their smartphone.

The most recent version of the app became available April 18. The new features are a scholarship calculator and a phone number section that provides university phone numbers, including those for the Baylor Police Department, ResTech, the Cashier’s Office and Health Services.

Texas senators on Tuesday advanced modest changes to state gun laws, trading incremental progress across the political aisle as they approved new penalties for those who seek to buy guns for criminals and voted in favor of allowing college students to keep guns in their cars on campus.

Both measures came with promises made to ease suspicions on the floor of the chamber.

Take a break and pet a puppy.

The Baylor Democrats will host a “Puppy Playtime” study break from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. Wednesday on Fountain Mall. About 10 foster dogs from the Humane Society of Central Texas will visit with Baylor students on across from Moody Memorial Library.

A 2-year-old girl born without a windpipe now has a new one grown from her own stem cells, the youngest patient in the world to benefit from the experimental treatment.

Hannah Warren has been unable to breathe, eat, drink or swallow on her own since she was born in South Korea in 2010. Until the operation at a central Illinois hospital, she had spent her entire life in a hospital in Seoul. Doctors there told her parents there was no hope and they expected her to die.

Eric Ames is a curator for the Baylor Library Digital Collections and works in the Riley Digitization Center at the garden-level of Moody Memorial Library. Ames and the Digitization Projects Group are responsible for online digital copies of the hundreds of thousands of historical documents in Baylor’s special collections. This semester, Ames has taught a new graduate level course called Technology and Outreach for Museums and Libraries that involved 15 graduate students learning how to build, digitize and advertise their own exhibits.

Paper or plastic? That is the choice facing to-go diners at Baylor’s residential dining halls.

Students will continue to have these options next fall. Reusable plastic containers will be offered in fall 2013 despite students’ lack of interest in the program, said Brett Perlowski, director of dining services. Baylor Dining Services officials hope to create more interest in the program next year, he said.

Dining Services, BAC and UB will be hosting the 2013 Pancake Break from 10:30 p.m. to 12:30 a.m. May 7.…

A fashion show featuring the designs of Baylor apparel design students will be from 3 to 5 p.m. on May…

Accounting professor Tim Thomasson is a favorite among the graduating senior class. The seniors have nominated Thomasson as The Collins Outstanding Professor of the year.

Thomasson will give the Collins lecture from 4 to 5:30 p.m. today at the Kayser Auditorium. The event is free and open to the public.

Musicians are working to help a Texas town decimated in a deadly fertilizer plant explosion.

Officials with the Texas Thunder Festival on Monday announced next month’s performances will benefit emergency responders and schools in West, where 14 people were killed in a blast on April 17.

A shooting at a smoke shop left one teen dead and another injured Monday morning.

Waco police officers responding to reports of a shooting at Eddies Smoke Shop on Waco Drive found two individuals — Dhaodrique Eastland, 17, and another 19-year-old victim both from Waco — with gunshot wounds to the upper torso and forearm, respectively.

Both were rushed to the hospital, where Eastland was pronounced dead.

A Houston man accused in a shooting rampage outside a courthouse admitted Monday that he opened fire on his daughter for testifying against him in a sex assault case but denied killing a bystander.

Closing arguments are scheduled for Tuesday, and jurors will then begin deciding whether to convict Bartholomew Granger, 42, in the death of 79-year-old Minnie Ray Sebolt.

The Community Development and Women’s Leadership Teams have a common goal: to help the people of Kenya.

This summer the two groups will go to Nairobi, Kenya, for a two-week-long mission trip in order to serve the community and work with the locals to improve their quality of life.

The annual Pulse lecture gives one undergraduate student the chance to present a published research paper. This year, Bastrop senior David Welch will present his paper on “hiddenness.” Welch’s lecture will center on his paper titled: “The Expanded Problem of Hiddenness for Christian Theodicies.” It was published in the 2012 fall edition of The Pulse, an undergraduate magazine sponsored by the Honor’s College.

A Mississippi man’s house is uninhabitable after investigators searched it but failed to find evidence of the deadly poison ricin, a lawyer said Monday, arguing that the government should repair the home.

Kevin Curtis was charged in the mailing of poisoned letters to President Barack Obama, U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker and a Mississippi judge, but the charges were later dropped. The investigation shifted last week to another man who had a falling out with Curtis, and that suspect appeared in court Monday on a charge of making ricin.

The defense team representing the Boston Marathon bombing suspect got a major boost Monday with the addition of Judy Clarke, a San Diego lawyer who has managed to get life sentences instead of the death penalty for several high-profile clients, including the Unabomber and the gunman in the rampage that injured former Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

Clarke’s appointment was approved Monday by U.S. Magistrate Judge Marianne Bowler.

“The true college,” writes the African-American author W.E.B. DuBois (in words etched in stone in the walkway at Brooks Residential College), “will ever have one goal – not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes.”

In “The Souls of Black Folk,” which contains the most eloquent defenses of liberal education ever written by an American, DuBois opposed the exclusion of African-Americans from the right to vote and from civic equality. But he objected equally to the exclusion of African-Americans from the pursuit of a truly liberal education, to their being limited to a merely instrumental education, and education in a trade.

Waco freshman Annie Jaska trains 20 hours a week.

She wakes up early, controls her diet and runs 60 miles. If she ran those 60 miles in one stretch, she’d be in Killeen.

Julie and R.J. Robinson have been married for six years and are studying at Truett Seminary, both on track to receive a Master of Arts degree in Christian Divinity. They were married while attending college in South Dakota where they earned their undergraduate degrees. They received no scholarships specifically for being married from this school, just as married students studying at Baylor will receive no such scholarships.

When the couple was first married, Julie would write down their combined income and their bill amounts. Sometimes they would be up to $500 short of the amount they owed for bills, but Julie said that God provided for their needs in ways that they would have never imagined, and at the end of the month things would always work out.

One year before enrolling at Baylor for the 2010 fall semester, hospital corpsman Rachael “Doc” Harrelson was rendering aid to fellow shipmates in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Now Harrelson is more concerned about financial aid than rendering aid.

Colorado Springs, Colo., junior Chuck Voss is paying his own way at Baylor. It’s not cheap.

According to the Baylor Student Financial Services website, the total an average Baylor student pays for two semesters of undergraduate education is $51,214.

Food. Everybody needs it. On-campus residents can get most of their meals the same way, through a meal plan, but they don’t all agree on its value.

These preset plans have benefits and disadvantages, and Baylor offers different plans than other schools in Texas.

Choosing which college is the best fit is tough. Tough because impacts your future. With the cost of higher education said to be on the rise, you’re not just choosing a brand name for your diploma – you’re choosing how much debt you may carry after graduation.
The choice isn’t easy.

Although many factors come into play when selecting a college, including location and size, local tutor Rachael Fineske, a 2000 alumna, said she chose to attend Baylor because of her religious background her family’s influence.

What do Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Michael Dell have in common?

They’re all incredibly successful, and all three dropped out of college.

For students wondering if the cost of studying abroad versus at Baylor’s Waco campus, it isn’t very different at all.

Though some students might imagine a semester living somewhere in Europe would be out of their price range, the truth is that if you can afford a semester at Baylor, chances are you can afford a semester abroad, according to Alamogordo, N.M., senior Allison Hainline.