Python's Requests or Mechanize to login to a site

Question

I want to start off by apologizing. I know this has more than likely been done more than enough times, and I'm just beating a dead horse, but I'd really like to know how to get this to work. I am trying to use the Requests module for python in order to login to a website and verify that it works. I'm also using BeautifulSoup in the code in order to find some strings that I have to use to process the request.

I'm getting hung up on how to properly form the header. What exactly is necessary in the header information?

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

session = requests.session()
requester = session.get('http://iweb.craven.k12.nc.us/index.php')
soup = BeautifulSoup(requester.text)
ps = soup.find_all('input')
def getCookieInfo():
    result = []
    for item in ps:
        if (item.attrs['name'] == 'return' and item.attrs['type'] == 'hidden'):
            strcom = item.attrs['value']
            sibling = item.next_sibling.next_sibling.attrs['name']
            result.append(strcom)
            result.append(sibling)
    return result
cookiedInfo=getCookieInfo()
payload =   [('username','myUsername'), 
         ('password','myPassword'), 
         ('Submit','Log in'), 
         ('option','com_users'), 
         ('task','user.login'), 
         ('return', cookiedInfo[0]),
         (cookiedInfo[1], '1')
        ]

headers = {
    'Connection': 'keep-alive',
    'Accept':'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8',
    'Origin':'http://iweb.craven.k12.nc.us',
    'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64)'
}

r = session.post('http://iweb.craven.k12.nc.us/index.php', data=payload, headers=headers)
r = session.get('http://iweb.craven.k12.nc.us')
soup = BeautifulSoup(r.text)

Also if it would be better/more pythonic to utilize the mechanize module I would be open to suggestions.