Northwood is about to get something it has never had: a doctor’s office of its own. Wood County’s first school-based health center is due to open in early 2027 on the Northwood schools campus on Lemoyne Road — and it will treat neighbors, not just students, in a city that today has no primary care provider at all, according to BG Independent News reporting summarized by Lake Erie Inquiry on November 7.
The clinic is a partnership between the Wood County Community Health Center and Northwood Local Schools. It will open with primary care in two exam rooms plus lab space, health center CEO Lindsey Ruivivar described the plans to BG Independent News, with care available to people without insurance and fees based on income. Dental and mental health services are future goals, not part of the opening, Ruivivar described to BG Independent News.
The need is stated plainly in the project’s federal paperwork. “There are currently no primary care providers located in the City of Northwood,” Rep. Marcy Kaptur wrote in her March 27, 2026 community-project funding request for the center. Kaptur’s request describes the project as the first school-based health center in Wood County, giving students and families convenient, local access to primary care alongside food resources and other educational supports on the school campus, in an area with high poverty, Medicaid enrollment and free-and-reduced lunch rates.
For Northwood families, the change is practical. A student who wakes up sick, a parent without a regular doctor, or a neighbor managing a chronic condition currently has to leave the city for basic care. A clinic on the school campus — where the district’s roughly 1,000 elementary and high school students already spend their days — removes the drive and the scheduling scramble, and the income-based fee scale is designed for exactly the residents least likely to have another option.
The project has been building for most of 2026. In March, the Wood County Board of Health approved a memorandum of understanding with the Northwood school board so the partners could apply for $500,000 in Ohio Department of Health start-up funding, up to $250,000 of it for capital costs, according to the board’s March 12, 2026 minutes.
By August, the renovation had real numbers attached. The Board of Health voted August 13 to backstop the work with up to $91,000 from the health center’s fund balance — spent only after grant dollars and any new funding — toward an expected renovation cost of about $291,000, and it awarded a $297,680 renovation contract to Midwest Contracting, according to the board’s August 13, 2026 minutes. The same meeting appointed Brasheai Leake as the site coordinator for the Northwood center.
Northwood is part of a wider Ohio push to put care where children already are. Statewide, school-based health centers have been expanding into rural districts — Marion County is getting a new school-based health center as part of a $55 million rural health initiative — and Wood County’s entry is built on the same idea: catch health problems early, keep students in class, and let a whole community use the building.
What we know — and what we’re still waiting on. We know the partners, the Lemoyne Road campus site, the early-2027 opening target and the opening scope — primary care, two exam rooms and lab space, open to the public. What we are still waiting on is an exact opening date and the clinic’s hours and appointment process, which the health center has not yet announced.
The longer-term vision is bigger than two exam rooms. Kaptur’s federal request would fund a second phase adding five dental operatories, a dental lab and a sterilization room — a request that remains pending — and the partners have named mental health services as a future goal as well, per the BG Independent News account.
The Northwood site will be a satellite of the Wood County Community Health Center, whose main location is on East Gypsy Lane Road in Bowling Green. The health center’s model — primary care offered regardless of a patient’s ability to pay, with fees scaled to income — is the same one it will bring to Lemoyne Road, per the plans described to BG Independent News. For a small city surrounded by larger systems in Toledo and Bowling Green, local leaders have argued that a clinic families can walk to from school is the difference between care that exists on paper and care people actually use.
What happens next: renovation proceeds under the Midwest Contracting contract, and the Wood County Community Health Center is expected to announce the opening date and hours as early 2027 approaches. When the doors open, Northwood residents will be able to see a primary care provider without leaving town for the first time.