WARREN, Ohio – Families in Warren have easier access to pediatric care with the opening of Akron Children’s Hospital’s new clinic inside the Warren G. Harding Student Recreation and Wellness Center.
Located on the high school campus, the clinic replaces Akron Children’s former downtown Warren office on Mahoning Avenue and offers a more central location for patients throughout the city.
For Warren resident Sara Phillips, the convenience is already clear. She brought her granddaughter for a six‑month checkup.
“My kids went to Akron Children’s,” she says. “I haven’t seen the inside yet but this is nice,” she added, glancing around the waiting area. She adds that the new clinic is about a mile closer than the previous location.
Akron Children’s Warren G. Harding clinic opened earlier this summer in a shell space built into the $36 million Student Recreation and Wellness Center, which opened in September 2024. Construction on the clinic itself began in November 2024 and wrapped up in April 2025.
Paul Olivier, vice president for Akron Children’s Mahoning Valley enterprise, says several factors aligned to make the project possible.
“We had this practice already opened in downtown Warren, and a few years earlier at Campbell schools, we had been approached to create a pediatric clinic,” Olivier says.
That earlier experience, he explains, showed the hospital how effective it could be to place care directly within a school setting. When Warren City Schools began planning the recreation and wellness center, school officials reached out to Akron Children’s to explore a similar partnership.
“The timing worked out well for us, because our downtown clinic location, the lease was coming up at about the same time this would be open,” Olivier says. “And we thought moving to this location would allow us to reach more children and teenagers and be where the kids are.”
The clinic features 12 exam rooms – more than the previous site – and employs about a dozen staff members.
“We see roughly 20 to 30 patients a day,” Olivier says. “We also have embedded in the high school our school nurse program, which is another reason why it made sense to move here, because then we have that partnership between this outpatient clinic and the work that our school health program does already in the high school.”
The clinic provides general medical services for children and young adults from birth to age 21, including well‑child checks, physicals and treatment for common illnesses. Behavioral health services are offered.
“We don’t take care of just children,” Olivier says. “We take care of children, teens and young adults, and then, in association with all the sports and athletic programs here at the school, it’s a great partnership for us to be able to support that as well.”
The move has been well-received, he says.
“It does get us embedded into a larger patient population right here, with the school, and because of the new building and the attraction that it will have for the community, we’ll be able to see more patients that way as well,” Olivier says. “It’s already worked out very well. We’ve been open a few months, pretty much all of our patients have come over from the old location, and we’re picking up new patients.”
Nurse practitioner Mercedes Randolph says patients are adjusting quickly.
“It’s going fantastic. Of course, it’s a new building. There’s been some hiccups with patients trying to find our building, but once they’re here, they really are enjoying it, and it’s easy to come back to once they’ve been here the first time.”
Randolph says many families can now walk to appointments, reducing transportation barriers.
“Transportation issues are large in Warren,” she says. “So we’ve had a lot of patients who live right near the high school that can now walk. It’s like a two‑minute walk versus a 10‑minute walk, maybe a bus ride, maybe trying to use insurance for a ride. So that’s been helpful.”
The clinic operates from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday, with plans to extend to 5 p.m. later this year. It is staffed by two doctors with plans to soon add a third, along with clinical staff, secretaries and a manager.
The space was built by DeSalvo Construction, which also handled the larger recreation center project.
“It was literally a cold, dark shell,” says Joe DeSalvo, owner of DeSalvo Construction. “The concrete floor wasn’t even poured there on purpose. And we have a couple other spaces within the building that were that way by design, so almost like the school district was acting as a landlord for future tenants to come in to provide health care.”
DeSalvo says his company worked directly with Akron Children’s and the original design team, which sped up construction.
DeSalvo described the early stages of construction as a fast‑moving, methodical process.
“The first thing that we did was all the mechanical, electrical, plumbing rough‑ins,” he said.
That step, completed quickly, set the tone for the rest of the project.
“We poured that floor slab within two and a half weeks of day one,” DeSalvo said. “That enabled us to basically cruise right to the finish line.”
Olivier said the long‑term vision for the clinic has been clear since planning began. From the outset, the goal was not only to relocate services but to deepen the hospital’s connection with the community by placing care directly in the setting where many children spend their days.
“The initial vision, which remains true today, is just to continue our promises of treating every child like they are our children, and turning no child away,” Olivier said.
To measure success, Olivier said the hospital will look beyond patient volume and focus on the quality of care, timely well‑child visits and how families feel about the experience. Patient satisfaction surveys and feedback will play a major role in assessing whether the clinic is meeting its goals and reaching the children who need it most.
“We hope that the students and the families and our patients just say that they’re very happy with the services that they’ve received here, and also that
they see us as partners in their child’s and teenagers’ health development,” Olivier said. “And that if they need us for anything, we’re here for them, that Akron Children’s becomes [synonymous] with the high school name, that people think of us together as a partnership.”
Pictured at top: Akron Children’s new wellness clinic at Harding High School in Warren opened earlier this summer.