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Director Toby Lineaweaver is ready to depart Woods Hole aboard the Penikese Island School's boat,
Harold M. Hill.

The island setting affords freedom of movement and opportunity for outdoor exercise.

VISION 3:
CARING FOR YOUTH AT RISK

In a literal sense, the route to Penikese Island starts in Woods Hole, Mass., and winds up at the far end of the Elizabeth Islands off Cape Cod. It continues for 80 sometimes gut-wrenching, clothes-drenching minutes across the choppy Vineyard Sound, which once provided a sweeping view for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis from her home on Martha's Vineyard.

In another sense, though, the route to Penikese starts in broken or at least damaged homes and wends traumatically through crime sites and juvenile lock-ups, often passing by scenes of violence, abandonment, drugs, alcohol and sexual abuse.

"By the time a kid is referred to us, he's been through an awful lot," says Toby Lineaweaver ’72, executive director of the Penikese Island School, a 27-year-old, year-round facility that serves up to nine boys who have been spit out of Massachusetts' public schools and juvenile detention system. "These are not your run-of-the-mill delinquents. These are kids on a fast track to lives of chronic social dependency, criminal behavior and adult incarceration."

The very remoteness of Penikese, once a leper colony, is seen as having a therapeutic impact on its young felons, who face charges ranging from car theft to assault, from drug dealing to breaking and entering. Separation from what its founders saw as society's "toxic" distractions—including commercial media, dysfunctional families, negative peer pressure, and life on the streets—could help at-risk youth concentrate, they reasoned, on rebuilding their character in a warm, supportive environment that attempts to simulate healthy family relationships.

Contributing to the feeling of removal from society is the island's lack of electricity, plumbing and central heating. The school shares the land only with nature, including a rare bird population that encompasses the southernmost known nesting colony of Leach's storm petrels. Faculty and staff—one for each two boys—work alongside the youngsters to chop wood for heating and cooking. They tend chickens and pigs, keep fences and buildings in good repair, catch fish, dig quahogs, prepare meals and tend a garden. Night reading and studying are done by oil lamp in the saltbox dwelling the adults and children share. The refrigerator works on propane, and a composting toilet sits in an outhouse uncomfortably distant from the dormitory, which itself was built with hand tools by Penikese's inaugural class. Summers fly by as kids swim, snorkel and explore the state-owned island's 75 acres. Winters, though, are long, cold and dark.

Lineaweaver did not establish the school himself, but rather reshaped it dramatically after taking over its leadership in 1996. The founding director, George Cadwalader, had given Penikese 21 years of his life prior to stepping down in 1994—but not before publishing a book in which he expressed frustration with the enterprise and characterized the boys as "walking time bombs." Titled Castaways, the book also detailed episodes in the school's early history, including a horrific occasion when a youngster broke the legs of every chicken on the island. The second director, Terry Sweeney, had died of a heart attack after just two years at the helm of what was then a foundering institution. His demise left Lineaweaver, who'd worked briefly for the school as a consulting psychologist and had recently taken up the post of assistant director, to steer a new course.

FACING THE DEMONS
The newest director had traveled his own circuitous route to the island. A Woods Hole native, Lineaweaver is the son of a science writer and his wife, a Falmouth business owner. The family placed a high value on education, and young Toby easily earned good grades in the local schools. His confidence, though, was shaken by his father's alcoholism, and at Phillips Academy he often felt like a fish out of water—or at least a small fish in a big pond. Chronically depressed and "on the fringes," he dropped out of the University of Miami and went to sea for two years on an oceanographic research vessel. Next he found his way to the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he earned a bachelor's degree in natural history and science writing. But when he returned to Woods Hole, it was to participate in his own recovery from alcoholism.

He believes his difficult experiences equip him well to deal with the youth in his charge. "The hardest thing I ever had to do was to face my inner demons," he says, "which is similar to the challenge these kids face. It was early in my recovery that I was drawn away from science and into the clinical field. I got a master's degree in counseling from Lesley College and subsequently became a licensed clinician."

Lineaweaver took clients most therapists didn't want to work with—largely teenagers, court-referred individuals and others resistant to therapy. His success with this obstreperous population prompted Sweeney to seek his help at Penikese, first as a consultant and then, in 1995, as assistant director. A few months later, Sweeney was dead.

"When I assumed leadership of Penikese in 1996, the program was stagnant. It was derelict in de- livering educational and vocational services and even more so in delivering clinical services. The staff had lost its zeal, and referrals of kids into the program had fallen off," Lineaweaver says. "Financially, the school was close to going under."

A FORWARD VISION
Despite those failings, Lineaweaver gives his predecessors high marks for their vision and insight. It was practically unheard-of a quarter-century ago to rehabilitate delinquents by providing a boy with the verbal and relationship skills required to get what he needs without resorting to criminal behavior. The emphasis on internal change, rather than behavioral modification, is deemed "cutting edge" by mental health providers in 2001, he says. And, without question, the pre-Lineaweaver school performed magic for many of its early residents, who still write to express gratitude to Penikese and Cadwalader.

Still, mistakes were made. One was an open admission policy by which virtually any troublesome boy was eligible to enroll at Penikese, without consideration of his suitability for the program. Another was a failure to hire faculty with mental health or special education credentials. This was the product of ex-Marine Cadwalader's inherent distrust of clinicians, who, he suspected, could be "talked around" by boys adept at worming their way out of things. He also had scant use for formal teaching, believing that, since the boys had failed in classroom settings before, any attempt to educate them conventionally would doom the Penikese experiment to failure

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© Phillips Academy, 2001