FORT WAYNE – Michelle Archer hopes her family can move out of relatives’ homes and into a house this month.

That would be one more step on a long path toward self-improvement that for Archer has included participation in a program to improve her parenting skills.

But those kinds of programs have an uncertain future as state funds dry up. Children’s advocates are looking to other sources to pay for parenting programs they feel are as important as ever with child-abuse cases on the rise.

Archer has participated in Healthy Families, a program offered in Allen County through Stop Child Abuse and Neglect (SCAN) that has been gutted by successive years of funding cuts.

Children’s advocates buy into the ounce-of-prevention, pound-of-cure school of thought when it comes to averting child abuse. SCAN grant writer Jennifer Boen said the agency has had to cast its net wider – and ask for smaller sums of money.

“We are having to go to more sources for funding than we ever had to in the past,” she said.

Healthy Families has the pedigree to attract funding. It’s a nationwide, research-based program designed to work with overburdened parents in their own homes, including families with possible histories of trauma, domestic violence, mental health or substance abuse issues.

The families in the program have not abused or neglected their children, but they have family or home stressors that put them at higher risk.

Archer, 35, already had two sons and a daughter when she gave birth to Teriann Geisleman, now 3.

“It’s not my first rodeo,” she said.

But she had concerns, enough to convince her to enroll in Healthy Families.

One of her sons has a speech impediment that wasn’t caught until he was 3 years old; years later, he still struggles.

Teriann’s father, Archer’s partner of nearly seven years, is a veteran of two tours of duty in Iraq. Terry Geisleman, 42, said he has struggled with anger and communication issues since his second deployment.

“I didn’t know how to deal with people when I got back,” he said.

Archer is a talkative counterpoint to her partner’s reserve. She likes working with her hands and says she’s going back to school in hopes of becoming a licensed practical nurse, but in the meantime, she’s working a factory job.

She was working six or seven days a week when her older children were toddlers, and certain tasks, such as breaking the kids from their bottles and potty-training, fell to the children’s grandmother.

With her younger daughter, Archer said she knew she needed to ask for help.

She learned more about the practical aspects of parenthood as well as the more intangible skills – how to deal with squabbles between her two daughters, for example, and impose disciplinary time-outs. Before that, she had trouble disciplining children in a structured way and would give in to their demands too easily, she said.

“I learned new parenting skills,” she said. “New ways to handle the stress.”

Teriann clomps in adult-sized dress-up shoes on her tiny feet. Her grandmother buys them from thrift stores; the white platform sandals are of a style popular in the late 1990s.

Geisleman, Archer and the children moved out of an apartment in April and have been staying with family in hopes of being able to afford a rental house this month.

Their stresses have continued since Teriann’s birth. Archer’s sons live with relatives in another county so they can attend a school where she believes her son gets better speech therapy, and Geisleman was laid off just before Christmas.

Both say they have benefited from the services provided through three years of Healthy Families – not just in terms of parenting, but in learning how to set personal goals.

Archer now recommends the program to any new parents she knows, even though the stress hasn’t always made it easy for Archer to follow through with her caseworker’s guidance.

“I’m like, ‘Stop riding me,’ ” Archer said, “And she’s like, ‘That’s what I’m here for.’ ”

More cuts expected

Families enroll voluntarily in the program, usually referred by their physicians or caseworkers through other social services.

Already, Archer and her family stand to receive less support through the program than others who have participated in the past. SCAN used to offer it for the first five years of a child’s life, but now the group can afford to offer it only for three years.

This fall, SCAN anticipates an additional $700,000 to $750,000 cut to the program and the loss of more support workers, Boen said.

SCAN tracks all the local families that go through the program; the enrolled families that complete the program remain free from cases of abuse or neglect 98 percent of the time, according to the agency’s most recent data, Boen said.

That information goes a long way toward convincing donors to support the program, and SCAN has had success with getting grants from organizations such as the Rothschild Foundation. It has also sought more support from individual donors and fundraisers but it hasn’t been enough to offset consecutive years of cuts by the state.

Last year, Healthy Families served 1,280 families; this year, it’s on track to serve 675 to 750.

Meanwhile, SCAN continues to track rising rates of child abuse and neglect in northeast Indiana. In 2009, the most recent year for which state data are available, more than 2,300 children were abused or neglected in Allen and eight surrounding counties.

That’s an increase of 30 percent from the previous year, according to the state’s data. The need is there, but the staffing isn’t, Boen said.

Boen said the agency is having difficulty convincing donors to take over funding of a program that used to be government funded. They don’t want to become the agency’s lifeline to funds for the rest of a program’s life, she said.

But SCAN argues it’s a pay-now-or-pay-later scenario. In Allen County, the cost to put one child into foster care from an unhealthy home situation is more than twice the cost of one year of Healthy Families services for an entire family, according to Boen’s research.

Other states are trying to justify their expenses for similar initiatives. In the state of New York, for example, a study of the program showed for every dollar invested in Healthy Families New York services, the rate of return is $3.16 by the time a child is 7 years old.

“It’s the preventative services we keep cutting,” Boen said. “The taxpayers don’t realize we’re going to pay for it out the other end.”

aturner@jg.net