Around The State

INDIANAPOLIS -- A divorced parent cannot be forced into poverty so his child can attend a private university in another state, the Indiana Court of Appeals ruled.\nBruce Snow had appealed a Madison County court order that he pay 59 percent of the cost for his 22-year-old daughter Meghan to attend St. Louis University, a Jesuit college in Missouri.\nSnow's ex-wife, Anita Rincker, filed suit in August 2003 to force him to help pay for his daughter's fourth year of undergraduate school and two years of graduate school. College expenses were not included in the original child support order.\nMadison Superior Court Judge Thomas Newman Jr. ordered Snow to pay more than $54,000 over three years, beginning with a lump sum payment of $15,664 for the 2003-04 school year and continuing at $100 a week afterward.\n"It was an abuse of discretion for the trial court to plunge a father into poverty to pay for a degree that could be earned at a less expensive, state-supported university," Judge John G. Baker wrote in the decision issued Tuesday.\nSnow, a body shop estimator with an income of $41,700 a year, argued that such payments would not leave him with enough money to live on.\nThe Court of Appeals concurred. Paying for one year of graduate school would leave Snow with $7,070 on which to live -- a figure that is below the 2004 poverty level for a one-person household, the ruling said.\nSnow's contribution should have been capped at the costs of a state-supported university, said the ruling, which ordered the lower court to recalculate Snow's obligation.