Q: Continuation of Child Support request for child who is transferring from Community College to College - Procedure?

A: You need to sit down with your former husband immediately to discuss your daughter going on to a 4 year school, since the issue will be whether she will live at home while attending college or whether she will be living at school while attending college. Those are 2 very different scenarios and your former husbands financial responsibility to pay child support to you dependent on the answer to that question as well as your respective contribution to her college costs. If your former husband is not willing to discuss the issue with you, taking the position that his obligation ends upon her graduation from her associates degree program, then you will have no choice but to file an applicaiton with the court for contribution from him to the college costs and potentially for the continuation of child support to you. As to whether you can do it on your own, the answer is NO. Sorry, but im a straight shooter and if you do it wrong, you lose and you will not then get the chance to hire a lawyer and redo it. To do it right, requires specific materials and where most pro se's go wrong, is that they think that the judge has nothing else to do with his time but to read through a stack of materials submitted with a 2-3 page certification to try and figure out what the litigant is saying. Sorry but it is not the responsibility of the judge to read through all of your materials to figure out what you are saying. Yet, too many pro se's do exactly that and are then shocked when they get an order in the mail denying their request and they are angry at the court system. Wrong. You would not watch a youtube video on how to perform surgical procedures and then be shocked when you end up in the emergency room because you screwed it up. This is the same thing. To file that application, the certifications alone are going to be 25 pages and there will probably be at least 20 different exhibits attached to that certification material with an index and reference to specific items in those exhibits and there will be a completed case information statement with your current income and asset structure as well as your prior case information statement and as much information as to your former husbands financial setting as possible, organized in a story format for the judge to follow. To do that application correctly takes experience and appearances before many family part judges to know that to include, what not to include and how to say it and my experience is that most general practitioners and pro se's do it wrong and then want to blame the wrong person for the outcome.

For whatever its worth, your daughter sounds terrific and despite your concerns, it sounds like you and your former husband did something right. Maybe you can convince him to meet with a family law attorney for a mediation session to discuss how the 2 of you can work together to help your daughter with her schooling.