How Custody Impacts Where Your Kids Go to School

01 Aug How Custody Impacts Where Your Kids Go to School

Parenting is difficult, and it can be even more difficult when going through a divorce. Not only are you going through a divorce, but now arrangements for child custody have to be made. Divorce not only impacts the parents, but the children as well. The children have to go through many changes including housing, medical care, and finances. While all these are important in a child’s life, there is one change that a child experiences greatly when going through a divorce: school. This then begs the question: how does being appointed (or not) a child’s “primary parent” affect your child’s school placement in Texas?

While going through a divorce or dealing with children’s issues in court, parents often fight over who will be “primary parent” to their children.  A “primary parent” is one who has the “exclusive right to designate the primary residence of the children.”  Historically, if a parent had that exclusive right, that meant that they could designate the children’s school and almost always, that that parent was the parent who had the children more than half of the time.  However, there have been instances where this exclusive right has conflicted with the parents’ shared right to make educational decisions for the child.  Increasingly, courts are going to be making decisions as to which right most directly affects where a child is going to go to school.

Noticing recent trends, we are seeing more and more that parents are coming to agreements throughout the divorce process and agreeing that neither one of them will be designated as the “primary parent.”  In that scenario, the question then becomes, “who gets to decide where the children go to school if neither parent is considered to be “primary?”

It seems like an endless cycle of questions and legalities, but we are here to help. For more information on this topic and how it could affect your family if you are going through a divorce or experiencing a co-parenting conflict, please call our office for an initial consultation at 940-566-0606.