Montrose - Daily Press

OLATHE — She wasn’t even looking into the camera, those small, chubby hands playfully covering her eyes.

Her daughter was such a beauty, Sheila says when looking at her favorite photo. The one she carried everywhere with her.

To forget about it, forget about how her 5-yr-old beauty died of cancer, all she could do was get high. Her sister had taken away her other two twin boys, so she spent each day waiting until her nightly phone call to them.

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The drugs, though, were always there. So was the depression, the darkness that set in after her alcoholic father committed suicide when she was a child.

That was over now, though. Now, on the plane to Grand Junction, she was headed for some nowhere town she’d never heard of. Armed only with her toddlers and a few spare clothes, she was ready for a change.

Sheila’s sister in Tennesse found the program for her. Teen Challenge House of Promise in Olathe. She and her boys could go there for a year and in the end, hopefully turn their lives around.

“For a long time, I just wanted to give up,” the 41-year-old said Thursday, sitting inside House of Promise’s classroom. “I needed a new outlook on life.”

The center, located on seven-acres just off Highway 50, opened two years ago. Part of a national network of Teen Challenge programs, the residential rehabilitation center is one of four in the country to accept mothers and their children, said Vicki Proffit, House of Promise director.

Proffit – or Ms. Vicki as she is called by her students – doesn’t advertise her program’s services. The mothers, she said, find her.

“All of them have a choice to come here,” she said. “They want their children. They want to change. Until they become healed it’s hard to take care of anyone else, including their own children.”

Teen Challenge reports a 67 percent recovery rate among its program’s alumni in living drug- and alcohol-free lives, according to a 1992-94 study by the University of Tennesee. The report, which surveyed graduates of the Chattanooga, Tenn., program, indicated that 72 percent of respondents also were currently employed.

Of the 26 women who have entered House of Promise since July 2005, seven have completed the entire one-year program, Proffit said. Pictures of their children, some who were born at Montrose’s hospital, decorate her large office. Many of the women, she said, have stayed in the area, working jobs at a local grocery store, construction company or going to school. One of the graduates, however, hasn’t maintained a job after the program and now lives on Social Security.

“The step from graduation to the real world is huge,” she said, “so we try to help them with that.”

After completing the program, Proffit and her small staff help the mothers transition into normal life. They contact a church in the area where the women would like to live and assign them to mentors who will help with housing, job placement and transportation.

Not every mother who enters the program, though, finishes out the year. Staff members allow the women to quit the program at any time, Proffit said, and others have been asked to leave “if they’re not making an effort to be good moms.”

When a woman decides to leave the program early, the center makes no arrangements for after care, she said. However, Proffit asks all women to bring enough money to get home in case they can’t finish the program. Since its opening, 10 students have left without graduating.

“We’ve never put anyone out on the street,” Proffit said.

For some of the women, like Sheila, the temptation to leave comes almost every day. She said getting used to the program’s busy schedule remains her biggest challenge.

The women wake every morning at 6 a.m. and divide their days into kitchen duties, daycare work, attending church, scripture readings and classes on job and practical skills like car mechanics and managing finances. Volunteers also work with mothers to earn their GEDs.

None of the seven staff members have professional counseling degrees, Proffit said, so the center works closely with the local health and human services office when students need outside therapy. When women first arrive, they have no phone or visitation privileges and spend the first two weeks confined to the center. Each mother has her own bedroom and bathroom and sleeps there with her children. As they move through the program, they can earn passes to leave the center and are allowed visits twice a month.

Such structure is necessary, Proffit said, because many of the students never learned how to function in society. Most women who live at House of Promise suffered from drug or alcohol problems. Many have spent time in jail, and experienced domestic or family abuse.

“They can’t handle life,” Proffit said of her students. “They have to find their feet because they haven’t walked this way before.”

Thursday morning, Proffit walked through the center, previously housing a community church, like an omnipresent grandmother. In the daycare room, she laughs at the toddler trying to turn somersaults on the worn carpet. She knows the names and ages of all 13 children currently living there. She knows the stories and heartaches of each of the 10 mothers.

Like Samantha, a 21-year-old mother of two from Tennessee.

Beaten down by family members who told her she’d never amount to anything, she found House of Promise after her young boys’ father entered a Teen Challenge center in Florida.

Before arriving in May, she lived alone with two babies. She left her house once a month to buy food and diapers at the grocery store and spent the rest of her time playing with her children and sitting around with her thoughts.

“My head is a very scary place to be,” she said. “I was just angry. I was like a stick of dynamite that was constantly lit.”

When her plane landed in Denver, she called her mother in Chicago. Close to tears and exhausted from traveling all day with her boys, Samantha felt the excitement about her decision to enter House of Promise fading.

Now, sitting inside the center’s classroom on Thursday, the bubbly blonde smiled and scrunched her nose when talking about the year ahead.

“God’s got me here for a reason,” she said. “I’m getting free here.”

The program accepts up to 11 women at a time and recently expanded its services to two years. Now, after graduating, women can move to a re-entry home where they live with House of Promise staff members for support. Days are less regimented as the women learn to care for their children with less outside help.

Some days, Proffit can hardly believe the successes made by the women.

“They don’t think they are worth anything,” she said. “We bring healing and wholeness to moms and their children.”

The center operates mostly on donations, and since opening, they have managed to remain out of debt, Proffit said. The cost to house, feed and educate each family runs about $2,000 each month. While the program asks mothers to chip in for care, Proffit knows the money might be hard to come by for her students.

Those who qualify for the federal Special Supplemental Nutritional Program for Women, Infants and Children, or WIC, receive about $28 per month for each child, Proffit said. In the past,  students also received food stamps and other government money, but funds were discontinued when changing guidelines no longer qualified the program for assistance.

Donations of baby quilts, women’s and children’s clothes, make up and toys fill two large rooms in the center. Area churches have furnished the bedrooms each family uses during their stay, and Proffit often fields calls from individuals wanting to send supplies like toilet paper, coffee creamer and sewing machines to the center. Occasionally, House of Promise also receives grants to off-set operating costs.

“Money hasn’t kept anyone out,” she said. “When they come to us, they’ve pretty much used up their options.”

Many, like Sheila, come because their families threaten to take their children away. For others, run ins with the law have forced them to change.

As a teenager in Virginia, Lana moved out of her parent’s house as soon as she scraped together enough cash. No curfew, no bedtime – she worked and went to school part-time but focused most of her attention on a boyfriend who pulled her farther from her family.

Slapped with a 15-year prison sentence for robbery at 19, Lana pleaded with a judge to exchange her jail time for a stint at a Teen Challenge center.

By then, she had given birth to her first child, a baby girl she could only see through two inches of glass.

“I thought about how much of my daughter’s life I would miss, how I would miss all the firsts in my baby’s life,” she said Thursday. “I needed a whole new life change.”

After filling out an application and undergoing a physical exam, she arrived at House of Promise last October. Early in her stay, she crossed the date off on a calendar each night, counting down the days until she could leave. She mouthed off to staff members, often getting in trouble and punished to memorize biblical passages.

Now, the 21-year-old is preparing for her November graduation and plans to move to the program’s re-entry house with her 1-year-old daughter.

“I don’t know what I want for my life,” she said Thursday. She’s considering her options though, including creating a dance ministry. She took hip-hop dance classes when she was younger and has heard of groups that travel to churches around the country, incorporating dance with evangelical messages.

For newcomers like Samantha and Sheila, Lana proves a future exists beyond a troubled past.

Whenever she feels like quitting, she looks at the picture of her daughter. Wearing an orange University of Tennessee shirt and bright pink tutu, the image of her beauty rests on a dresser in her room at House of Promise.

The days are long, but she knows she’s not ready to leave yet.

“I don’t have time to be depressed,” Sheila said, her usually stoic face spreading into a smile. “I know I’ve got to keep walking the walk.”

Contact Maggie Stehr via e-mail at maggies@dailypress.com.

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