The April 2021 Texas Standard Possession Order

Hi, everyone. Chris Schmiedeke from Divorce Simplified, back for another one of my award-winning reviews of the Texas Standard Possession Order. Not really, that’s a joke. So we are talking about the month of April in terms of the days that each party gets, the non-custodial parent or the custodial parent. It’s not too exciting. However, this is the notice month, so this is the month where people must give notice for their summer possession and the custodial parent for their weekend possession inside of that extended summer possession.

First, let’s talk about the days of the visits. As you’ll see, the Thursday possessions are April 1st, 8th, 15th, 22nd, and 29th. Those are the Thursday possessions under the basic standard possession order, which is 6:00 to 8:00. Then we have the non-custodial parent’s weekend visits and there are three Fridays this month. So you have a first Friday, a third Friday, and a fifth Friday. So the non-custodial parent will get these three weekends rolling into May. And then of course all the other times here in blue are designated to the custodial parent and those are their times.

Next, let’s look at the deadlines. So we have April 1st as the deadline for the non-custodial parent to designate a custom-extended summer possession order. So non-custodial parent if you intend to use the default days of July 1st to July 31st, you don’t need to do anything here because it’s automatically going to default to those dates. If you intend to have custom dates then you would need to make your designation of those dates by this day, April 1st. I’m going to make another short video that covers this in a little bit more depth.

The weekend deadline is for the custodial parent. Custodial parent, once the non-custodial parent establishes their extended summer possession, you are entitled to have one weekend inside that extended summer possession. So they designate first, obviously on April 1st, and then you have two weeks to pick the weekend you want out of that extended summer possession. If they go to the default dates of July 1st to July 31st then you get a weekend inside of there, provided you give notice by this date, April 15th. If they pick custom dates, say two periods of 15 days, then one of those weekends inside those two periods of 15 days, give notice per this section here, and you will get that weekend.

All right, there’s not much more to this, as I said, I’m going to make another short vlog on the actual notice provisions and the standard possession order that apply in this situation. So you may want to stay tuned for that but in the interim non-custodial parent you have basically three days to get your notice out. So I said three days, but it’s not even three days, you just have a few days to get your notice in. Not all is lost if you don’t get that notice in because you’re going to default to July 1st to July 31st anyway, and as I said, go ahead and drop a link to this other video that I’m going to make that discusses these provisions a little bit further in detail to try and answer some questions that commonly come up. Other than that, I will talk to you guys in May.