More than 10,000 children are in foster care today across the state of Washington.

More than 2,100 children have “legally lost their parents forever and are waiting to be adopted into permanent families,” according to a proclamation from the Grays Harbor Commission.

For these reasons, and others, commissioners declared this Friday (Nov. 15, 2019) to be National Adoption Day in Grays Harbor County.

The proclamation was approved and signed Tuesday by commissioners. There will be a ceremony beginning at 3 p.m. Friday in Superior Court at the courthouse in Montesano. Judge Stephen Brown will preside over as many adoptions as possible and there will be snacks and games after, Court Administrator Jessica Peterson said.

This will be the 15th year that National Adoption Day has been celebrated by courts across the state. In the past nine years, almost 1,500 children have been adopted into new families in these celebrations, the proclamation states.

“The National Adoption Day is a celebration of the families who step forward to adopt the children out of foster care,” Brown said. “It can be through relative placement or other foster care parents. But as more kids are adopted, unfortunately. more kids come in. So we are always looking for new families to adopt kids. … The public is invited to come. Normally these proceedings are private, but the people going through the process have agreed to have the public attend.”