The start of a new school year can bring an unexpected financial question for divorced or separated parents: Who pays when a child joins marching band, club sports, competitive dance, or another extracurricular activity?
Registration is often only the beginning. Uniforms, equipment, tournament fees, travel, private lessons, and other expenses can turn a relatively inexpensive start-up cost into a significant commitment of time and expenses.
For divorced or separated parents, Nebraska law and their custody order guide each parent’s responsibility.
Understanding Nebraska law and what your existing court documents say before registration deadlines arrive can help prevent a disagreement later in the school year.
Nebraska Divorce Decrees and Extracurricular Expenses
Nebraska law requires that the court order include each parent’s responsibility for several child-related expenses, which can include an order to share in the extracurricular expenses.
A responsibility for a share of these expenses can be in addition to the basic monthly child support obligation. It all depends on your type of custody.
This distinction is important. Paying monthly child support does not necessarily answer who is responsible for every expense associated with a child’s activities. Much of a parent’s responsibility for the extracurricular costs depends on the type of physical custody. The first place to look to determine a party’s responsibility for extracurricular costs is the existing decree and parenting plan.
Joint Physical Custody – Shared Extracurricular Expenses
If the parents share joint physical custody, the child support is often a much lower amount or may even be zero. Each parent is providing for the child on their own time and each parent has about the same amount of time with the child. If the parents have about the same income and have the child about the same amount of time, neither parent pays the other child support. There is no “non-custodial” parent.
When the parents share joint physical custody, the extracurricular activities will generally occur during the parenting time of both parents. The parents will generally be required to share in the costs of the agreed-upon extracurricular activities. For example, if the parents have about the same income, then the parents might be ordered to split the extracurricular activity costs 50/50. If one parent’s income is much higher than the other, the parents might be ordered to share expenses in a way other than a 50/50 split. The child support calculation includes each parent’s percentage of parental responsibility and this percentage is generally used to determine the percentage split of the extracurricular costs. If one parent’s earnings are much higher than the other parent’s earnings, the higher-earning parent may pay a higher percentage of the extracurricular costs, such as a 70/30 split of expenses.
Primary Physical Custody – No Share of Extracurricular Expenses
On the other hand, if one parent has the child the majority of the time, this parent is said to have sole physical custody or also called primary physical custody of the child. The parent that has the child majority of the time is called the “custodial” parent. This does not mean that the non-custodial parent has no rights to the child. It just means that the child primarily lives with one parent. The non-custodial parent often has specific rights to parenting time, such as on weekends and holidays. Primary physical custody is common when the child primarily lives with one parent but spends every other weekend with the “non-custodial” parent.
When one parent has primary physical custody, then the non-custodial parent generally pays the custodial parent child support. This child support can be a significant amount. Generally, the custodial parent is then responsible for all the extracurricular activity costs for the minor child and has to budget to use the child support to find a balance between paying for the child’s activities and other needs. In most cases where one parent is granted primary physical custody, the non-custodial parent is NOT court-ordered to pay for extracurricular costs in addition to the monthly child support.
Exceptions
There are many exceptions to this. In most cases, the parents can draft financial arrangements that best work for their child and their circumstances. This could include a non-custodial parent paying a reduced amount of child support but also paying a share of the extracurricular expenses. The parents could divide up costs with one parent paying for band and the other parent paying for soccer. A parent could take on a greater share of the expense of a certain activity if the other parent agrees to provide the majority of the transportation.
If you have a divorce decree or custody order in place, you will need to review the specific terms of your order to see if the general rule or an exception applies to you. The exact language matters because not every family has the same arrangement. Your custody order should have details whether a share of extracurricular expenses is ordered to be paid in addition to the basic monthly child support. If a share of the extracurricular costs is not ordered, then the default is that extracurricular costs are generally the responsibility of the custodial parent receiving child support.
The Registration Fee May Be the Smallest Expense
When parents discuss extracurricular activities, the initial registration fee may receive the most attention. For many activities, however, the larger commitment of time and finances comes later.
Club sports may involve:
- Uniforms and equipment
- Tournament entry fees
- Out-of-town travel
- Hotel accommodations
- Meals during travel
- Private coaching or training
Marching band can bring its own expenses for instruments, maintenance, uniforms, camps, travel, and competitions.
Similar issues can arise with dance, cheerleading, robotics, theater, and other school or competitive programs.
Before agreeing to an activity, parents should understand the complete expected cost rather than focusing only on the amount due at registration.
Agreement is Often Required
One of the more difficult situations occurs when one parent commits to an expensive or time-consuming activity before discussing it with the other parent.
Consider a child who wants to join a competitive travel team. Both parents may support the child’s participation, but the activity could involve thousands of dollars in fees, equipment, hotels, and transportation over the course of a season. The child may be expected to have a parent when traveling, leading to lost wages or excessive vacation days.
The disagreement may have little to do with whether the child should participate. The real question may be whether one parent had the authority to make that commitment and then expect the other parent to contribute financially and give up their time for the activity without their consent.
Before enrolling a child in an activity, it is useful to review the court order and discuss:
- The expected total cost
- How expenses will be divided
- Which expenses are included
- Whether advance approval is required
- How and when reimbursements will be made
- What happens if additional costs arise during the season
Having that conversation before registration is considerably easier than trying to resolve it after money has already been spent or the promise already made to the child.
Many court orders actually REQUIRE that a parent communicate and obtains consent from the other parent before promising the child or signing up the child for an activity that will occur on the parent’s parenting time. Ignoring this requirement can lead to a violation of the court order and potential sanctions by the Court if the violation was egregious.
Consider the Time – Not Just the Money
The financial commitment is only part of the equation.
A marching band schedule can include Friday night football games, weekend competitions, summer camps, and evening rehearsals. Club sports may involve practices several nights per week and tournaments that consume entire weekends.
These commitments will usually have some overlap with each parent’s parenting time and take away from the child’s opportunity to spend time with family, other friends, and from non-scheduled activities.
Before committing to a demanding activity, parents should consider both the financial and scheduling impact.
Questions worth discussing include:
- Who will provide transportation to practices?
- How will weekend tournaments affect parenting time?
- Who travels with the child to out-of-town events?
- How will unexpected schedule changes be communicated?
- Are both parents expected to attend or contribute to travel expenses?
Addressing these questions early can prevent an extracurricular activity from becoming a recurring source of conflict.
Keep in mind that the focus needs to be the child but that the best interests of the child often means finding a balance. While there is value in extracurricular activities and sports, there is also value in spending time with family and non-organized time with friends. You may need to adjust the parenting time schedule to help find that balance.
Keep Approval and Expenses in Writing
Even parents who communicate well can remember conversations differently months later.
A quick conversation about joining a team in August can become difficult to reconstruct when reimbursement for tournament hotels, equipment, or additional fees is requested in November.
Written communication provides a clearer record.
Parents may want to retain:
- Registration information
- Emails or text messages discussing the activity
- Written approval when required
- Receipts for equipment and uniforms
- Tournament or competition schedules
- Travel expenses
- Reimbursement requests
- Records of payments
Documentation becomes particularly useful when an activity lasts several months and expenses occur at different points throughout the season.
What If Your Current Order Does Not Provide Enough Clarity?
A child’s activities change significantly as they get older.
A parenting plan created when a child was six years old may not anticipate the financial and scheduling realities of competitive sports, marching band, dance, theater, or other activities during the teenage years.
Nebraska law recognizes extracurricular expenses as part of the child-related financial obligations, and provisions addressing these expenses may be subject to modification when there has been a material change in circumstances.
That does not mean every new activity requires a court modification. It does mean parents who repeatedly disagree about substantial extracurricular costs may want to have their existing court order reviewed to see if a modification is appropriate.
Depending on the circumstances, clearer provisions may address:
- How qualifying extracurricular expenses are divided
- Whether advance approval is necessary
- Spending thresholds
- Reimbursement procedures
- Deadlines for submitting receipts
- Travel-related costs
- How activities interact with parenting schedules
More precise language can provide both parents with clearer expectations as their child’s interests and activities change.
Review the Decree Before Fall Activities Begin
Club sports, school sports, dance, band, and other activities can provide valuable experiences for children, but they can also create financial commitments that were difficult to anticipate when a divorce was finalized.
Nebraska parents should not assume that monthly child support automatically answers who pays for these expenses. The existing decree and parenting plan should be the starting point.
Reviewing those documents before registration, discussing substantial expenses in advance, and keeping agreements in writing can help parents avoid preventable disputes and keep the focus where it belongs: on their child.
What if the Parents Do Not Agree on the Child’s Involvement in Activities or the Costs of the Activities?
One common problem arises when the parents do not agree on the appropriate level of involvement or costs for the child’s activities. Sometimes it is a matter of the time commitment; other times it is the matter of the costs. Frequently, it is the matter of both the time and the costs. Especially as the child grows older, the time commitment and costs can grow with the child. The young child’s weekly swimming lesson may now mean a teen doing daily swim practices and weekend swim meets out-of-town. One parent may want to support their child’s interests and foster their dream while the other parent may argue that some of these funds spent on swimming would be better spent on saving for a vehicle for the child or for the child’s college education. Often neither party is objectively wrong and that it is just a matter of a difference of opinion.
There often is not a perfect solution in these cases. However, there are many, many options that can work depending on the specifics of the situation. Often the parents need to find some compromise. For some examples:
- Limit the child’s involvement to one sport or activity at a time. The child gets the option as to what sport the child most wants to play, but can only participate in one sport at a time (with a little wiggle room for the overlap in the seasons).
- Adjust the parenting time days so that the parent that is more pro-sports has more of their parenting time on the practice days. Adjust weekends around the child’s travel schedule so that the parent that likes to travel with the child has the away-game weekends.
- Agree on a different level of participation. Choose a club or level within the club that has less practices per week or a lower requirement for travel. Find a team that can excuse some missed practices or missed events if needed to accommodate parenting time.
- Create tiers of priority for the activity. Especially for non-team sports or solo activities, you may be able to create different levels of priority for what the child must attend and what is up to each parent to determine the attendance. For example, if the child attends 4H, their local County Fair and State Fair may have a high level of priority. The parents agree that the child gets to attend these high priority activities every year no matter which parent’s parenting time days they fall on. However, for events with lower priority, such as the many optional or non-required meetings and events, it is up to the parent whose day it falls on to decide if the child attends the lower priority event or not. Once the parents have decided what are the high and low priority of events, they have flexibility in choosing the child’s level of participation on their own parenting time days for lower priority events. The parents also plan around the child’s schedule so that the child gets to attend all the high-priority activities.
- Assign each parent responsibility for a certain sport or activity. For example, maybe one parent’s passion was cross country and the others was soccer and the child enjoys both. One parent handles all the costs and scheduling of one sport and the other the other. So long as the seasons have little overlap, each parent can have some autonomy in their decisions and responsibility for the costs associated with their decisions.
- Agree that one parent pays more for the activity and the other parent provides more of the time/transportation for the child to attend the activity. This can be especially helpful if one parent has more time/flexibility and the other parent has more funds.
- Agree to cut back on extracurriculars for the sake of the child’s future in other areas. The parents and child may agree that the child will cut back on certain activities or the level of involvement within an activity in exchange for an agreement for the parents to put additional funds aside for a vehicle for the child, for a college savings plan for the child, or other account or benefit for the child’s future.
- Have the child make a financial commitment too. The child agrees to help with certain extra chores for money or earns money with a part-time job to help fund their activities and get a real feeling of the costs of their activities. This can be an especially attractive solution when a teen wants to participate in activities that come with a greater cost and there are part-time jobs available for the teen in the area.
- Assist the child in being independent. Instead of putting funds towards the child’s activities directly, help the teen with purchasing a vehicle and insurance so that the teen can maintain a part-time job to help pay for their own activities and provide their own transportation to many of the activities and events.
- Seek out discounts, share costs in time and money, and barter. Especially if the child is talented and you are of limited income, will the club or team provide a discount or scholarship to make the activity more affordable? Can you and your child share a hotel room with another parent/child to split costs? Can you choose a team with other team members nearby that are willing to set up a carpool? Can you and your child trade volunteer time working concessions or an event for a discount on the team fees?
- Caps on Expenses. The parents can agree that one parent’s responsibility will have a cap on expenses, such as once a certain monthly threshold is reached, the parent has no further responsibility to pay towards these expenses as they simply cannot afford it. This can be especially useful when one parent’s income is much higher than the others but both parents want the child to be involved in certain activity.
The child’s best interests need to be the focus when finding a solution. However, there is often a balance as heavy participation in sports or activities takes away from time with family members, with other friends, and for less organized activities. The costs can take away funds that could be put towards the child’s education or that are realistically needed for the family’s other expenses. If the child is truly passionate about an activity, the parents need to be more accommodating in trying to find a way for the child to participate. Things that the child feels less passionate or less committed to may need to be cut to help find that balance. With some flexibility and creativity, there is often a solution to be found that is overall in the child’s best interests.
Law Office of Julie Fowler, PC, LLO
Trusted Family Law Attorney in Omaha, Nebraska
Facing a divorce, child custody dispute, or child support matter in Omaha? You don’t have to navigate family law alone. Whether you need an Omaha divorce attorney, an Omaha child custody attorney, or comprehensive family law representation, our experienced team is here to protect your rights and your family’s future.