Residents in some cities and towns in Central Texas will be voting on city council members, bond propositions and school board races May 4. Early voting starts today and closes April 30. Here's a roundup of items on the ballots.

Celebrate Earth Day with Guayakí at the Native Hostel.

Every UT student completes the sexual assault awareness modules and attends the consent theater performance at orientation. After that, UT does not provide any further mandatory sexual education requirements. So, when one of our readers asked us, “Why doesn’t UT have more comprehensive sex-ed resources besides the EverFi course that freshmen take?” we looked into it as part of Curious Campus, a series where we answer reader-submitted questions.  Kathryn Redd, associate director for prevention and outreach for the Counseling and Mental Health Center, said EverFi is the sexual education and assault prevention modules that incoming students must complete before classes.  “Incoming students experience the sexual assault prevention for undergraduate modules, which is online comprehensive information and education about consent, sexual violence prevention and resources that are also available on campus,” Redd said.  Along with EverFi, UT has organizations such as Voices Against Violence that run campaigns during sexual violence awareness month and perform interactive dialogues. Redd said other educational resources regarding sexual violence are provided when requested.  “The trainings that we do for sexual violence prevention are on an as-requested basis so we go into student orgs, classrooms, fraternities and sororities,” Redd said. “A small team can’t reach 250,000 students, so we work with our campus partners so that our message can get spread as far and wide as possible.” One of the platform points that former student body president Colton Becker ran on during the last Student Government election was the increased presence of sexual assault awareness. Becker said he noticed the modules and performances were not enough to start conversations on campus.  “Right now, the University offers online modules that most students just click through as fast as they can without really understanding the information,” Becker said. “(With) all of this information that they are being bombarded with, they aren’t in the position to fully understand some of the issues that encompass the gray areas of interpersonal violence, including consent.”  To increase the conversation to all UT students, Becker’s administration started an initiative to train First-Year Interest Group and Transfer-Year Interest Group leaders this spring to take to their classes starting in fall 2019. Trainings include different resources from Not On My Campus, a sexual violence prevention and education organization.  UT also provides general sexual education resources for students at the Longhorn Wellness Center. Katherine Protil, health promotion coordinator for the wellness center, said four or more students can request Anatomy and Contraception or STIs and Communication workshops. In addition, the center works with the Gender and Sexuality Office to reach all students. “We work closely with Gender and Sexuality Center to include the LGBTQ community for comprehensive sexual education campaigns and education,” Protil said.  This fall, FIG and TrIG students will experience the increase in sexual assault education pushed by Becker.  “Sexual assault is unacceptable, period,” Becker said. “The University has a responsibility to its students to provide resources and information in the interest of curving sexual assault.”

Four undergraduate male students are suing the University, saying they were unfairly disciplined for actions they committed as pledges in an unnamed fraternity last fall, according to a lawsuit filed in early April.  In the lawsuit, the anonymous plaintiffs accuse the University of violating the students’ rights under Title IX, the U.S. Constitution and the Texas Constitution.  While the exact reason for the University’s disciplinary actions is not specified in the lawsuit, it states the Office of the Dean of Students placed the students on disciplinary probation and required them to participate in a Virtual Academic Integrity Module tutorial. The tutorial is a disciplinary requirement for academic dishonesty, according to information on the tutorial from the UT Libraries website. The lawsuit states the University violated Title IX, the federal law banning discrimination on the basis of sex at any institutions that receive federal financial assistance, because it does not punish female students, especially sorority members who participate in sorority-related activities, as often or as severely as it does with male students.  “The University treats all students and student organizations equally under its rules and policies and does not discriminate on the basis of gender,” UT spokesperson Shilpa Bakre said in an email. The students are seeking $1 million plus attorneys’ fees, as well as the striking of the disciplinary action from the students’ records.   #mc_embed_signup{background:#fff; clear:left; font:14px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; width:100%;} /* Add your own Mailchimp form style overrides in your site stylesheet or in this style block. We recommend moving this block and the preceding CSS link to the HEAD of your HTML file. */ Want more content like this in your inbox every morning? The students, who are anonymously named Jon 1 Doe, Jon 2 Doe, and so on, are represented by attorneys Chigozie Odediran and Terry P. Gorman. Neither responded to multiple requests for comment. According to the lawsuit, the students have been harmed “emotionally and economically for perhaps the rest of their lives” by UT’s disciplinary process. The economic harm from the University’s disciplinary actions refers to students potentially being required to retake a class, meaning they would have to pay again and possibly stay at UT for an extended amount of time in order to complete the class. The lawsuit describes the University’s disciplinary process for students as a “Draconian Disciplinary Dragnet” that is “confusing” and “limited,” and results in students rarely being found innocent. It states that in some cases, such as the plaintiffs’, students are denied the right to appeal their punishment directly from the Office of the Dean of Students. In other cases, students are given hearings conducted by the University with a panel of students and faculty to determine guilt. Another complaint outlined in the lawsuit is that the University uses lawyers during disciplinary hearings while also denying students any legal counsel of their own, providing reasoning for the lawsuit to claim UT violated the students’ due process rights as listed in both the U.S. and Texas Constitutions. The lawsuit also claims the students’ equal protection rights under these constitutions were violated. Bakre said UT has not yet been served with or formally notified of the lawsuit, so it has yet to file a response in court.