Until she was 18, Katie Jones got to see her mom only once a week, for a one-hour session with her five brothers and sisters, monitored by a social worker.

“Every week I used to say, ‘When do I get to see my mom?’” she said Thursday at an event where Gov. Glenn Youngkin launched a push to transform the state’s foster care system.

Those hours were always filled with tears, and they always ended the same way: “I’d have to say, ‘Bye, mom,’ and go back to my foster family,” said Jones, who grew up in Chesapeake. “I love my mom unconditionally, and she loves me unconditionally.”

Katie Jones gets a hug from first lady Suzanne Youngkin. Gov. Glenn Youngkin, second from left, is calling for a transformation of the foster care system.

So, too, do the parents who eventually took her in, she said.

That was several years after “when I was 11 years old, I just gotten off the bus, went inside, got the bag of chips, sat on the bed, put the TV on, and started doing my homework,” she recalled Thursday.

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“A few minutes later, my mom came knocking on the door and told me, ‘Katie, I looked outside of my home and saw police cars,’” she told advocates gathered for Youngkin ‘s launch of his “Safe Kids Strong Families” push.

“I was physically taken away from my mom and got put into a social services car and saw my home for the last time. I, along with my five other siblings, were taken to social services and put in a room for hours, crying and screaming from our mother,” Jones said.

‘Hope and heartbreak’

Youngkin said Thursday that the challenges are huge and feelings are complex when children need to leave their parents’ home. He said Virginia needs a more comprehensive way of running a system that does not always work as well as it should.

“We know all too well that that balance of hope and heartbreak never ends when it comes to foster care,” said Youngkin’s Secretary of Health and Human Resources, Janet Kelly, speaking of her own experience as a foster parent of a relative’s baby boy.

Youngkin called Kelly in three years ago after hearing reports that as many as 100 children were sleeping in offices at social services departments because they had no place to go.

An intense effort by state, local and nonprofit agencies means it’s rare these days for any child to do that, Youngkin said.

Another effort, to boost “kinship care” — when relatives take in a child, as Kelly and her husband did — has produced results.

Kinship care

Kinship care is usually far less traumatic than most of the other options when children cannot safely stay with their mothers and fathers. Youngkin said it’s now the priority for social services departments across the state.

The kinship care effort has seen Virginia move from last in the nation, with just 13% of children entering foster care finding a kinship care place, to 21% now.

Youngkin wants to bring that total to 35% with newly available financial and social services support for kinship care families.

But there’s still work to do, he said.

Last year, 71% of children in Virginia who died from abuse or neglect were from families where Child Protective Services had already been involved. This is the branch of local social services departments that is responsible for responding to concerns about neglect or abuse.

Some 40% of social workers doing those heart-rending jobs quit within a year, he said.

“My own sister had a full career in foster care services in the city of Chesapeake,” Youngkin said, “and she eventually, after being there more than 20 years, said, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’”

‘Transformation effort’

“We are going to initiate a fundamental transformation effort,” Youngkin told the advocates.

“We’re going to work together to tackle some of these challenges, to prevent every single child death in the commonwealth of Virginia, to increase our ability to place children in safe homes, to get kids out of congregate care and into families, to supply and support foster families with resources that they need … and to address the systemic challenges that are inherent in the way our system is set up, with local administration and state oversight and how we work together,” he said.

“We can do so much better, and that is the effort at hand,” Youngkin said.

Youngkin, who leaves office in January, said he expects to have a detailed plan of action in place by the autumn, including legislative proposals for the 2026 session and any new funding in the final budget he’ll present in December.

“The story you heard from Katie is really important for us to incorporate,” he said. “Most importantly, I want to make sure that we’re already running in this blueprint and accomplishing things,” when he hands it to the next administration.

He said that includes “everything from changing the way we think about (the) way the system works, to changing the way we support that system, from identifying the outcomes that we want,” to making sure the state is measuring and working toward those outcomes.