The members of Team Seamus McDuff (OK, how cool is that name; the origin is for a later column) recently got the opportunity to tour Portland’s best-kept secret: Open Meadow.

Open Meadow is a program for middle school and high school students who have dropped out or at risk of dropping out. It’s terribly impressive. It’s been around for decades and has a high success rate for get students to graduate and to provide them a platform for success after graduation.

I spent 12 years in the Portland area as a newspaper journalist, mostly covering education issues, and I never heard of Open Meadow until I joined Leadership Portland.

The tour included a look at the alternative program’s “high school,” a gorgeous, Queen Anne home overlooking the Columbia River, a stone’s throw from the University of Portland (one of our team mates graduated from U of P and lived briefly near the Open Meadow high school, and he, too, had never heard of it).

Beyond the basics of providing an education, Open Meadow offers a program called Step Up, which supports in-coming high school freshmen. Educators have said for years that you can tell the future trajectory of students by how well they do as freshmen. Step Up provides a safety net for those kids to get them through the tough times of being the “new kid on campus.”

Team Seamus McDuff has decided to make Open Meadow our project. We’re not 100 percent sure what we’re going to do for them, but there’s no question that this is a worthy program.

Stay tuned…