The VLW Blog

You read that headline right.

In an effort to round up parents who fail to pay child support, Spotsylvania County will start putting their names on a flyer tacked onto a pizza delivery box, reports The Associated Press.

When a newspaper publishes the names of men arrested for soliciting, they call it a “John list.” Maybe they’ll call the names on the pizza box flyers the “Papa John list.”

A woman who heads a local nonprofit dedicated to child support enforcement came up with the idea. She previously lived in Ohio, where local police used this method. Spotsylvania is apparently the first Virginia jurisdiction to try the tactic.

Will area businesses cooperate? So far, three local pizza joints have agreed to post the names; two Asian restaurants will put the flyers on takeout bags.

Any number of divorcing couples has learned – usually the hard way – that you can’t use child support as a bargaining chip in trying to strike a deal on a property settlement agreement.

A couple in Roanoke is the latest to get this lesson. In Wykle v. Wykle (VLW 007-8-130), the husband and wife entered into a PSA: The dad, “in lieu of” paying child support, would pay the first and second mortgages on the house where the mom and their minor daughter, Savannah, lived until the girl turned 21.

As some point, the dad decided he didn’t like this arrangement and moved to have the PSA declared to be unenforceable. The mom argued that the dad was supporting his daughter by paying the mortgage.

But Roanoke Circuit Judge Charles N. Dorsey struck the PSA. He found that the arrangement, which called for the payment of fixed mortgage payments, deprived the court of its jurisdiction to modify or enforce child support. That violated one of the tests set out in Shoup v. Shoup, the 2001 case from the Court of Appeals on the issue.

As a result, the agreement was unenforceable. Motion granted.