Fort Leonard Wood, Mo. ? In the living room of a tract home inside a military base, visitor Nicole Wong opens her arsenal of teaching tricks: a plastic craft box filled with homemade puzzles, magic markers and shaving cream.

Meridyth Clark, 2, and her sister Olivia, 4, are hooked.

“What does that feel like?” Wong asks as she squirts the shaving cream onto a tray.

“Daddy!” Olivia says. “It smells like Daddy.”

Wong, a visiting educator with Fort Leonard Wood’s Heroes at Home program, is part of an $8 million federally funded military version of Parents as Teachers at 24 bases nationwide. The program provides free education tips for parents as well as in-home early childhood screening for disabilities and learning delays.

Started in 1981 as a small program for new parents in four Missouri school districts, Parents as Teachers has evolved into an international household brand, embedding itself in living rooms from Fort Leonard Wood all the way to China. It’s so big, the organization has a training center in the warehouse district of Maryland Heights for new educators from around the world.

Yet the recession has placed this early childhood education powerhouse in the financial line of fire, potentially forcing it to scale back not only its reach in Missouri but also the program model it had hoped other states would follow.

As its funding shrinks, options may include charging middle- and high-income Missouri families for follow-up visits.

“As funding gets more lean, one of the things that we’re beginning to look at is to provide some fee-based services,” said Chris Nicastro, commissioner of the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, the agency that administers Parents as Teachers’ contracts statewide.

Revenue shortfalls are dire in Missouri and nationwide.

Last month, the Pentagon threatened to cut all of its funding for the Heroes at Home program. In Missouri, lawmakers are close to approving Gov. Jay Nixon’s recommended $4.1 million cut to Parents as Teachers Missouri programs in its next fiscal year. That move, coupled with another $3.4 million cut in the last budget season and a recent $2 million withholding, would shave 22 percent off its original $34 million budget in 18 months.

Missouri is the only state in the country that publicly funds Parents as Teachers programs in all of its school districts.

Critics in the Legislature say the organization may be helping too many in the middle class who could pay for these resources or find them elsewhere, while not focusing enough on needy families. Parents as Teachers classifies 57 percent of its served families in Missouri as high-needs.

“We felt their direction maybe needed to be emphasizing the higher-needs students,” said Rep. Mike Thomson, R-Maryville, the chair of the Missouri House Appropriations Committee for Education.

Sue Stepleton, CEO of Parents as Teachers National Center, said Missouri’s model would probably have to retool given what’s being said by those who hold the purse strings.

She said legislators should not underestimate the program’s significance to the middle class. Limiting free visits in those homes to initial screenings will lead to more children with undiagnosed learning disabilities and developmental problems, she said.

The organization calculates that taxpayers save $3,700 per child per year in special education costs because of early screenings. Regardless of socioeconomic background, schools also benefit from increased parental engagement in early learning and school activities, Stepleton said.

By next year, the department will offer financial incentives to entice educators to reach families with higher need. Parents as Teachers educators who visit those families would earn nearly double what they are paid to work with a middle-class family, Nicastro said.