Item from the Smart
Marriages Archive, reproduced in the Divorce Statistics
Collection
The Texas Legislature did adopt a comprehensive
Standard Possession Order (SPO) for use in all parent-child suits.
The visitation guidelines have worked very well. They have greatly reduced
the amount of fighting in a divorce over what visitation will be. Also,
when the guidelines were first adopted back in the 1980's, they increased
the amount of visitation above what was customary in Texas, even after
accounting for judge-by-judge variance.
The Texas Family Code prescribes that the Texas Supreme Court will convene
a
committee to evaluate possible changes in the SPO, and in Texas' child
support guidelines. The Committee is to be made up of custodial parents,
non-custodial parents, parents receiving child support, parents paying child
support, lawyers, judges, and legislators. The Committee meets every two
years, in the months leading up to Texas' biennial legislative session.
The
present Committee consists of about 50 persons.
I am Chair of the Guidelines Committee, and the Committee is now in the
process of meeting.
To date, every bill forwarded to the Legislature from the Committee has
been
enacted without substantial amendment.
At the present time it is difficult to predict what the Committee will do
in
this cycle of meetings, but there seems to be support for switching from
a
Wednesday overnight visitation to a Thursday overnight visitation on the
1st, 3rd and 5th weekends of the month, so that the noncustodial parent
will
have the child on Thursday night, Friday night, and Saturday night (and
possibly Sunday night) during "on" weeks. The thought is that
changing the
Wednesday overnight to a Thursday overnight would be less disruptive.
The SPO is not necessarily to be applied for children under age 3. For
children under age 3, the judge is supposed to fashion orders suited to
the
particular family. According to the comments raised in Committee
discussions over the years, most (but not all) Texas judges order the SPO
for children under age 3. Efforts to legislate a different formulation for
visitation with children under age 3 has failed at the Committee level every
time it was raised.
To access the SPO, block copy the following URL into your browser location
window and press enter:
http://capitol2.tlc.state.tx.us:8888/cgi-bin/cqcgi?CQ_SESSION_KEY=VPOIIIYCAS
JW&CQ_QUERY_HANDLE=123990&CQ_CUR_DOCUMENT=2&CQ_TLO_DOC_TEXT=YES
If that does not work, then go to this URL:
<http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/statutes/statutes.html>
then click "search" and then do a Boolean search of the Family
Code for the
phrase
"Standard Possession Order". Then select Chapter 153 of the Texas
Family
Code.
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