A story released today by the Morris News Service reports that when Tom Scardino of Savannah got divorced in 1999, his wife gained primary custody of their two pre-teen sons.

Like most divorced fathers these days, he has the kids every other weekend and during the summer in a joint-custody arrangement.

But Georgia's child-support system does not take into account what he spends when the children are with him. As the non-custodial parent, he has to pay a percentage of his gross income in child support, while his ex-wife is not subject to a similar requirement.

Thousands of other non-custodial parents across the state face similar circumstances.

Their plight is at the root of legislation pending in the Georgia House that would overhaul the guidelines judges use in awarding child support.

The bill would shift the emphasis from gross income to net income and require both parents' incomes to be considered.

But the measure faces stiff opposition.

With Day 33 of the 40-day General Assembly session rapidly approaching, the deadline for bills to pass at least one of the two legislative chambers or die, it's stuck in the House Judiciary Committee.

Opponents readily concede that the current guidelines have led to inequities in individual cases. But they argue that the solution the bill offers would be worse than the problem, especially for the children of divorce.

Reps. Earl Ehrhart, R-Powder Springs, and Ben Allen, D-Augusta, introduced the bill last year, and Ehrhart has made the child-support system one of his priorities for several years.

But he and other supporters believe their cause acquired new momentum last month when a Superior Court judge in Atkinson County declared the current guidelines unconstitutional.

''That decision really puts the state on the spot,'' said Ehrhart, a divorced father who does have custody of his two children.

The issue goes back to 1989, when the legislature adopted the current guidelines in order to qualify Georgia for $25 million in federal funding for child-support enforcement.

In their haste to get something on the books, lawmakers adopted a system modeled after guidelines in Wisconsin that were based upon low-income families receiving welfare, said Daryl LeCroy, an Atlanta-based lawyer who represented the plaintiff in the south Georgia case. ''No research was done to see what it costs to raise a child in Georgia,'' he said.

Today, Georgia is one of only a handful of states that requires only non-custodial parents to pay child support.

The vast majority split the payments between the mother and father, taking into account their incomes and the amount of time each spends with the children.

Rep. Stephanie Stuckey Benfield, D-Decatur, chairman of the Judiciary panel's Family Law Subcommittee agreed that some non-custodial parents have a legitimate grievance, particularly outside of metro Atlanta, where she said judges tend to be less flexible in enforcing the guidelines.

But she suggested a better solution than throwing out the current system would be allowing disgruntled parents to appeal child-support rulings, now prohibited in Georgia family-law cases.

With the bill bottled up in committee, Ehrhart is hoping to attach it as an amendment to a related bill.

The other child-support measure is not on Monday's House calendar, but could come up as early as Tuesday, which would be Day 33 of the session.

But Benfield said more time is needed to address the issue properly.

She said she'd like her subcommittee to take it up this summer and be ready with a bill by next year.