Teachers become foster parents | "They're the only people who really ask me ... how everything's going"

Tim Givan has just finished his first quarter at Central Washington University, passing all of his classes, making new friends and competing in wrestling and rugby.

He's a long way from the troubled home he left at the end of his junior year in high school. It was around that time that two science teachers at Federal Way High School took the unusual steps of taking Givan and his sister, Prinnis Montgomery, into their homes, worried the teenagers would become wards of the state. In June, The Times told their story.

Givan, home from college for the holidays, planned to spend them with Ingrid Lyden, his teacher-turned-foster parent, who is currently on leave from teaching.

The Lydens have kept in touch regularly, sending him care packages that, like many college kids, he forgets to acknowledge.

"They're the only people who really ask me questions about how everything's going," Givan said. "Other than that, I'm on my own."

Montgomery has had a harder time. She left the home of Jenny Williams, her former science teacher, last summer and moved in with relatives in Pierce County.

Now she is living, at her own request, with her infant sister in a foster home in Auburn. Montgomery says she likes it there, but she still struggles with depression.

"I think they got me at a bad time of life," she said. "All my motivation's gone now, and I have yet to get it back."

Sometimes she misses Williams, now an assistant principal at Federal Way. She says she thinks she might have made a mistake, leaving that family to find another.

— Cara Solomon