By Juliana A. Torres Staff Writer If not for guidance and consistent love of his foster parents, Peter Smith and Ann Marie Randolph-Smith, 18-year-old Tyrone Burns wouldn’t be the man he is now. “I think I’d been in jail right now or dead,” said Tyrone, who was given recognition by the Osceola Visionaries last month.
	Foster parents Peter Smith and Ann Marie Randolph-Smith, seated in their home, were instrumental in the life of Tyrone Burns.

 The Smiths, who live in Poinciana, have cared for about a dozen foster children in the last 15 years. They first met Tyrone because they were caring for his two younger brothers. When Tyrone learned where his brothers were, it was arranged for him to meet up with them at an event for foster children at SeaWorld.

“When I had to leave, that hurt me, because I saw them happy and I was going back to a group home I didn’t want to be at, with other people that didn’t care about what I was doing or how I was behaving,” Tyrone said.

Tyrone was living with 10 other youths like him at the home. He had lived in 18 different homes since his mother had walked away from him when he was 4 and “broke his heart,” he said.

“He wanted to come live with us, and we didn’t want to pick up another kid because we knew he had a lot of problems,” Randolph-Smith said. “He was a troubled youth, in and out of different homes, and so his brothers were as well.”

The Smiths would let Tyrone come visit his brothers on weekends, or for birthday parties, partly to get to know him. After about a year and “much persuasion,” Randolph-Smith said she decided to give him a chance. Tyrone moved in, just after his 16th birthday.

Two months later, he and Peter Smith had a big fight. The cops were called and, Randolph-Smith remembers Tyrone sitting in a chair in the dining room, resigned to his fate.

“Everybody throws me out anyway,” she remembers him telling her, explaining it was just a matter of time before the Smiths threw him out. In that split second, Randolph-Smith looked at the teenager and made a decision.

“I said, you know, ‘I’ll never let you go. I love you too much to let you go.’ I really felt like I did love him,” she said. “We were getting ready to let him go.”

It was at that moment that the trust between Tyrone and the Smiths began to grow. Tyrone asked if he could call them “Mom” and “Dad,” even though, he came into their household anxious to turn 18, the age he could leave the system and be out on his own.

“From the time he came to my home, I’ve never disappointed him. I’ve always been consistent, always showed him love. That’s what eventually changed him,” Randolph-Smith said. “There’s good in everybody. “You can’t give up, especially on youth.”

The Smiths enforce curfews with their foster children, make sure they stay in school and teach them life skills, how to cook, keep a budget and wash and iron their own clothes. The change was very hard, Tyrone said. He hated school and wanted to drop out.

“I just had to adjust. I had two little brothers with me. They had to look up to me,” he said. “I just had to make the choice to listen to them because they were my new parents.”

The Smiths emphasized the importance of giving foster children they care for a real home.

“The one thing we always told him was that when he came to us, we always treated him like our kid. We never called him a foster son,” Peter Smith said. “You can’t treat them differently.”

The Smiths' own children – five between the two of them, ranging in ages from 26 to 41 – treat the additions to the family like their own siblings. The Smiths even took their current charges to Pennsylvania with them for Christmas, even though they had to secure court orders to be able to so.

Even though following the rules of being a foster parent is difficult, the rewards are great, Randolph-Smith said.

“If you want to really help somebody, then you have to give up a few things to be able to do that,” she said. “These black kids, they just end up on the street most of the time. There’s a lot of lost kids out there. I have such a passion for that.”

The teenager graduated from high school and is attending classes at the Universal Technical Institute, studying diesel auto mechanics. He works two part-time jobs at Disney, for about 44 hours a week.

“He has blossomed into one wonderful man,” Randolph-Smith said. “I brag about him because it’s the truth.”

And for all his previous declarations about his desire to get out on his own, now the struggle is to get him out of the house, Randolph-Smith said, laughing.

“If we could do one thing, it would be to encourage other families to reach out and help out children,” she said. “If kids have the right environment, they can reach for the stars.”