Photos by Kyle Green | The Roanoke Times

Gov. Tim Kaine was joined Friday at Family Service of Roanoke Valley by his wife, Anne Holton, Sen. Emmett Hanger, R-Augusta County (right) and Del. William Fralin, R-Roanoke.

Calvin Jones (left) and Anthony Williams shake hands after giving Gov. Tim Kaine souvenirs from the Family Service of Roanoke Valley's Teen Outreach Program.

Gov. Tim Kaine formally signed a series of bills Friday that is intended to reform Virginia's foster care system.

During a signing ceremony at Family Service of Roanoke Valley on Campbell Avenue, Kaine told a crowd of advocates and elected officials that the bills are "child-centered, family-focused and community-based."

Kaine and his wife, Anne Holton, toured the Family Service building and met with 10 teenagers in the agency's Teen Outreach Program prior to the bill signings.

Holton said her experience as a juvenile and domestic relations district court judge in Richmond led her to support many of the measures that became law Friday.

"There's a whole lot of legislation this year about helping kids in foster care connect with their siblings or connect back with their biological families or extended family or new family, and get them the support they need like Family Service here," Holton said to the agency's staff members.

She said the legislation was targeted largely at "older kids in foster care striving mightily to become successful independent adults, to be good family members themselves to their future families and to their loved ones despite all the odds."

"The gist of what we came up with, what you need to help these young people more, is really quite simple," Holton said. "It's you need to recruit more families and you need to support them better. You need to support biological families so that children may not need to come into care. You need to support extended families so that extended family can help take care of young people where possible. You need to recruit alternate foster and adoptive families to be permanent families, to be new families to young people who need them, and you need to support them better."

Several of the bills were sponsored by Del. William Fralin, R-Roanoke, who attended the ceremony.

He carried bills to enhance visitation rights for siblings separated by foster care and ensure that foster children older than 18 but younger than 21 maintain a support system even after leaving foster care.

Another bill, co-sponsored by Fralin and state Sen. John Edwards, D-Roanoke, establishes a framework for the Office of the Children's Ombudsman in the Commonwealth, which is intended to act as a clearinghouse for parents dealing with child-related government agencies.

Although no funding was provided for the office in the two-year budget passed by the General Assembly, Kaine said it's an important piece of legislation.

"It's not unusual to put initiatives in the budget, to kind of put a framework in without money on the hope that, 'OK, we can find money when things open up,' " Kaine said.

Kaine likewise touted Fralin's bill to provide more support for older foster children.

That legislation allows individuals to discontinue receiving living services, but opt back in within 60 days if things go awry.

"A reality that many of them face is they would get to be 18 or 19, they would age out of the foster care system, and then ... Where do they go for Christmas? Who calls them on their birthday?" Kaine said.

"Nobody at age 18 is really capable of just walking into the world as a free agent without community support, especially if the child has had some real challenges growing up because of lack of stability of adult relationships in their life. That's what we've tried to tackle with this," he said.