So as some of you know I am taking Mental Health Counseling courses this fall. I am going to be working on getting a Mental Health Counseling degree so I can become a licensed counselor in Kanas, one of the five hardest states to become licensed in. I am pursuing this because Art Therapy is still a little known field and not licensible in many states, licenses are desirable for hiring as they are required for insurance reimbursement, in order to produce counseling licensible students at the University we need an art therapy faculty that is a licensed counselor, and we are planning to start a duel degree program at the University you help streamline the process of receiving both an MHC and AT degrees. I agreed to become a licensed counselor when I took my current job.

So I applied for and got accepted to the Mental Health Counseling program at the University I work at this spring. I signed up for 9 hours worth of classes and applied for tuition assistance (for 6 credits) and fee wavers because of my status as a an assistant professor there. (I am still waiting to hear about the tuition assistance but did already get the fee waver). When I applied I put that I have lived in the state for about 6 months, however by the time the semester begins I will have lived in KS over a year. I expected this would be enough to qualify me for in-state tuition and didn't give it a second thought.

Last week I received my tuition bill and to my dismay it was nearly $7000 as I am being charged out-of-state tuition. I contacted the registrar immediately to try to remedy this and was told I need to fill out a residency form. I figured this would be no big deal and went to campus to pick one up and fill it out there. However when I picked up the form I was also given a sheet that listed all the documents I needed to photocopy and accompany the form with when I returned it. The documents are as follows:

• deed/mortgage for the house
• KS drivers license
• KS voter registration
• KS car registration
• Most recently filed state and federal taxes (3 documents)
• and because of my recent marriage and name change, a copy of our marriage license, so it is clear that Jessie Woolhiser and Jessie Stallings are one in the same.

That is 8 documents in all. The form to fill out is 4 pages long and requests all my financial information--living costs, income, etc etc; asks for my parents information (if I were still a dependent) and many other things that are simply not necessary to prove I am a resident of the state.

And here I thought being a faculty member of the university for a year now would have been enough to prove in-state status!