A medical assistant treats a patient at a new school-based health clinic at Randolph High School, run by Codman Square Health Center. Plans to open the facility, which has four exam rooms and provides primary care services, were announced in 2022; the facility started serving students Nov. 17.

A long-running effort to bring expanded pediatric and primary care to Randolph has finally reached the finish line, as a clinic run by Codman Square Health Center and hosted in Randolph High School began operations Nov. 17.

The opening of the schoolbased clinic represents a milestone along a lengthy road toward increasing health care access in the town.

The new clinic joins a similar school-based health center operated by Codman Square at Tech Boston Academy in Boston. Across the Boston Public Schools district, 13 schools offer schoolbased centers in collaboration with either a community health center or the Boston Public Health Commission.

Michelle Tyler, the town’s director of planning who has helped steer much of the effort, said the process has been a labor of love.

“While I am tired, it’s also a happy tired, to see the project come to a conclusion and to see what it will mean for the community going forward,” she said.

The town has long struggled with a dearth of primary care options, especially for its younger residents.

A 2019 community wellness plan developed by the Metropolitan Area Planning Council found there were no outpatient facilities, urgent care centers, lab services, or medical specialists located in Randolph. (In 2023, an urgent care facility did open in the town, which, as of the 2020 Census, had a population of about 35,000). While some primary care practices did exist, they were limited to services for adults.

In a 2024 interview with the Banner, Tyler described the landscape as such that if a student needed a sports physical, the process could be an all-day affair as parents needed to take the day off work, pull their kid out of school, and make the trek to a nearby facility or go all the way to Boston.

While Randolph falls within the service areas of four hospitals, residents reported not feeling as welcome at those facilities, according to the 2019 Metropolitan Area Planning Council wellness plan.

The new health center services should close some of those gaps, said Carme Ogando-Saintil, a family medicine physician at Codman Square and medical director at the new school-based clinic.

“Being within a community where you can access care, where your insurance is accepted, where you’re able to serve an underserved population, it’s going to be very helpful to the community,” she said.

Tyler said she expects that by reducing barriers, the services offered will also increase the number of people actually seeking and accessing care.

During the day, from 8 a.m. to about 1 or 2 p.m., the facility will serve students from the adjoining high school as well as Randolph Public School students from the town’s middle school and four elementary schools.

The clinic will offer a full slate of primary, preventative and wellness care, including behavioral health care, vision and hearing screenings, vaccinations and annual checkups and sports physicals.

The health center said it accepts most commercial insurance plans, as well as plans like MassHealth and Medicaid. The center also has a policy to provide care regardless of insurance status or ability to pay.

By early afternoon, the Randolph clinic will transition from student-facing operations to serving the broader community.

“Everyone that needs health care in the Randolph area and chooses to come to Codman Square Health Center at Randolph High, we will be seeing in the afternoons from about 3 p.m. to 8 p.m.,” said Dr. Guy Fish, Codman Square’s CEO.

Fish said the expansion was an important step for the health center to serve the needs of its patient population by going into neighborhoods. He said Codman Square Health Center conducted an analysis of the patients it serves that found that of the roughly 25,000 patients who receive care through the health center, 6000 live in Randolph and surrounding communities.

Many, he said, moved out of the health center’s Dorchester neighborhood when they were priced out by rising rents.

According to The Boston Foundation’s 2025 Greater Boston Housing Report Card, in 2025 the median sale price for a single-family home in Randolph was $580,000. In Boston, the median sale price for a single-family home was about $837,000.

Living further south comes with cheaper rents, but also, potentially reduced access to the health care services residents know and rely on.

“That creates an enormous barrier to care, if every time that you want to see the doctor, it’s a 10 mile drive — it takes you 20 minutes by car, maybe it takes you a full day, round-trip, by bus,” Fish said. “That barrier to care has been exactly why we’ve recognized that many of our patients are now living well south of us, and we need to be where they are.”

Although the new clinic’s primary care services have not yet opened up to the public, Ogando-Saintil shared an anecdote of meeting with one Randolph resident who will not miss her trek to Boston for care.

“She was so excited, and she was saying how it’s within walking distance for her,” Ogando-Saintil said. “I think that there’s a need, and the community is very excited about us going out there.”

The path to open the school-based center has been a long one.

The town started working on the project in 2022, when Rep. Ayanna Pressley scored $1 million in federal Community Project Funding. At the time, those funds were expected to cover all the costs.

But by 2024, rising costs pushed the project to $3.2 million and delayed the clinic’s opening beyond its original early-2023 target.

Even as the clinic opens to students, some lingering construction pieces of the project, like installing a permanent HVAC system, still have to be checked off. And services for the community at large are coming, but are not open yet, Ogando-Saintil said.

While the renovations have progressed on a delayed timeline, Codman Square Health Center staff began to provide some care to students beginning in 2023, including some behavioral health care as well as sports physical exams and vaccinations.

As the project progressed, town leadership eyed what its opening could mean for further expanding health care access in the town, with the longterm vision of opening a full federally-qualified health center in Randolph.

Tyler, who has long been an advocate for bringing a full health center facility to the town, said that’s still on her to-do list.

She said that sort of resource would bring a full spectrum of important primary care services to Randolph, as well as dedicated community health workers who can connect residents from Randolph and nearby towns to other resources.

“Health centers typically serve [as] more than just a spot for primary care; they really are kind of the nexus of all things related to health and well being,” Tyler said.

A lack of adequate testing, vaccine and treatment sites during the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted that need, she said, and the town’s growing population will continue to require expanded access to care.

“As we continue to grow, we need to be able to support a quality of life for all of those residents,” she said. “That includes providing primary health care services so that folks don’t have to go those distances in order to receive quality health care.”

Previously in the mid- 2010s, a separate effort aimed to turn a municipal parcel holding a then-unused elementary school into a community health center.

That plan would have built a health center, to be operated by Mattapan Community Health Center, plus a nursing program through Massasoit Community College and housing for adults 55 years old and above.

That proposal ultimately failed, potentially due to disagreements about the rezoning that would have been required to see the facility built.

Fish said that for Codman Square Health Center, that sort of effort for a full health center is something they’d consider, but the idea had to go on the back burner as they worked to get the school-based clinic up and running.

Now that the facility at Randolph High School is indeed up and running, with all the appropriate sign-offs from the state, he said the idea is “certainly a brighter blinking light on our radar than it was even a week ago.”

The clinic at the town’s high school will be a valuable asset to serve Randolph community members — especially those who have long-relied on Codman Square’s services — but he said he anticipates the need will be greater than the new facility’s exam rooms will be able to accommodate.

“If you think about serving those [6000] patients, the four exam rooms that we have at Randolph High School — even if we use them every day for the full day — would never meet the demand that we believe is there,” Fish said.

He pointed to the oftquoted line from the movie “Jaws,” which turned 50 this year: “So the saying goes, ‘we need a bigger boat,’” Fish said. “That’s what we’re planning next.”