Toby Lineaweaver has helped rebuild the faltering Penikese Island School, which saves young boys destined to spend their lives in jail.

The Penikese Island School (www.penikese.com) is a small school and home for boys from broken homes, located on tiny Penikese Island 12 miles SW of Woods Hole, Massachusetts. The school is 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.

Lineaweaver did not establish the school himself, but rather reshaped it dramatically after taking over its leadership in 1996. When he assumed leadership of Penikese, the program was stagnant -- derelict in delivering educational, vocational and clinical services.

Lineaweaver's reshaping of the school entailed the tricky task of recalibrating the balance of academics, vocational training and clinical services. He waged an A-to-Z effort that involved capital improvements, financial strengthening, programmatic rebuilding, restaffing, and looking at the by-laws to see how well the school worked as a corporation.

Today, the school is the healthiest it's ever been. Participants' literacy skills advance by an average of two years at Penikese, and the school is more financially sound as well. Educational, vocational and clinical programs are stronger, and a new Aftercare program for school graduates has been established. Moreover, today 67 percent of Penikese "graduates" who are delinquent and often serious traumatized boys who usually enter the program after involvement with the juvenile courts are arrest-free a year after graduation, and 83 percent have not been incarcerated during that year.

Thanks to Toby Lineaweaver's efforts as director of this school, Penikese is at its most successful ever, setting new benchmarks in treatment innovation and excellence while keeping true to its founding philosophy and integrity.

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