Metro Detroit – In a heartwarming example of community partnership, Henry Ford Health is gifting a former hospital building to the Jalen Rose Leadership Academy (JRLA) – a Detroit charter high school co-founded by NBA legend Jalen Rose – to become its new campus. The announcement came during JRLA’s 15th Annual Celebrity Golf Classic in Detroit, a star-studded fundraiser where Rose revealed that in about two years, students will move from the school’s current northwest Detroit location to the spacious facility just across Eight Mile Road in Royal Oak Township. This Henry Ford Health donation marks a major expansion for JRLA and is being celebrated as uplifting news in Metro Detroit education circles.

Jalen Rose Leadership Academy, Facebook

A Hospital Becomes a School: Key Details

The distinctive arched entrance of the former Kingswood Hospital (pictured above) will soon welcome students instead of patients. The site, located at 10300 W. Eight Mile Rd., is set to become JRLA’s new high school campus – thanks to Henry Ford Health’s donation of the 70,000-square-foot facility built in 1966. The hospital provided inpatient behavioral care for decades until it closed in early 2025 when Henry Ford opened a new behavioral health center in West Bloomfield. Rather than let the building sit empty, the health system chose to give it new life by gifting it free-of-charge to JRLA – a move leaders say will benefit the community for generations.

Some key facts about the donation and JRLA’s plans include:

  • Location: The future JRLA new campus will be at 10300 W. Eight Mile Rd. in Royal Oak Township – just about two miles from JRLA’s current Detroit site. Students will effectively move north and east across 8 Mile, into the inner-ring suburb just over the city border.

  • Facility: The donated building is the former Kingswood Hospital, a 70,000+ square-foot, five-story structure that opened in 1966. It served as a behavioral health hospital (about 100 beds) for nearly 60 years before its recent closure. Henry Ford Health acquired the facility in the 1980s and maintained it until a new 192-bed psychiatric hospital opened elsewhere.

  • Timeline: Renovation work (including some demolition and retrofitting) is scheduled to begin later in 2025, with the goal of welcoming JRLA students for the start of the 2027–28 school year. In other words, current 9th graders could be the first senior class to graduate in the new building.

  • Current Site: JRLA’s existing high school campus (near Eight Mile and Greenfield in Detroit) serves ~400 students in grades 9–12. Once the high school moves out, that Detroit facility will be converted into a middle school – marking the first time JRLA serves 6th, 7th and 8th graders. This will allow families to enroll students straight out of elementary school and keep them in the JRLA family through graduation.

  • Funding: JRLA is launching a $20 million capital campaign to fund the hospital-to-school transformation. Construction costs are significant for a building of this size, so the academy is seeking support from donors and the community. (The annual Celebrity Golf Classic and similar events help jumpstart these efforts.)

  

New Space, New Opportunities for JRLA Students

JRLA founder Jalen Rose (above, speaking at a school fundraiser) sees the new campus as a chance to expand the academy’s impact and serve more Detroit students. Since launching JRLA in 2011, Rose – a Detroit native and retired NBA star – has focused on preparing local youth to become leaders in whatever their futures hold. Now the school finally has room to grow along with that vision. “We are so very grateful to our friends at Henry Ford Health for giving us the perfect place to grow our family and impact. The sky’s the limit for our scholars, who will have the space to learn what they need in high school to succeed in college and careers,” Rose said, expressing his excitement for the opportunities the larger campus will provide.

The new building’s size means JRLA can significantly expand enrollment and programming. Rose called the expansion “an incredible undertaking” that will allow the school “to influence so many more metro Detroit students” in the coming years. In fact, the high school’s capacity could eventually double to around 800 students, and the planned middle school could serve another ~400 young scholars once fully established. Features of the former hospital will be repurposed for education – for example, the facility includes space for a full-sized gymnasium, which will be a welcome upgrade for student athletics and assemblies.

Middle School on the Horizon (Grades 6–8)

One especially exciting part of JRLA’s expansion is the addition of a new middle school. For the first time, JRLA will be able to serve students in 6th through 8th grade, starting in 2027. Once the high schoolers move to the Royal Oak Township campus, the plan is to convert JRLA’s existing Detroit building into a dedicated middle school for those younger grades. Local parents have long expressed interest in a middle school option, and now that wish is coming true – families will have the chance to keep their children in the JRLA community from early middle school all the way through 12th grade.

Educators at JRLA believe this continuity will strengthen their “pipeline” of student development. By beginning the leadership and college-prep curriculum in middle school, students can be grounded in JRLA’s culture and values even earlier, setting them up for success by the time they enter 9th grade. The ability to nurture kids “a little bit younger,” as Rose put it, means the academy can reinforce good habits and high expectations from day one – which ultimately leads to stronger outcomes in high school and beyond. (JRLA already boasts a graduation rate far above the city average, and many of its alumni are the first in their families to attend college – results the school hopes to build on with this expansion.)

Henry Ford Kingswood Hospital, Facebook

Community Comes Together: Health System Partnership

This Royal Oak Township school expansion isn’t just about a building – it’s about an ongoing partnership between a healthcare provider and a local school. Bob Riney, President and CEO of Henry Ford Health, emphasized that the gift is “so much more than the donation of a building – this is the start of a meaningful partnership” with JRLA. Henry Ford Health plans to work closely with the academy on initiatives beyond the construction itself, from student mentorship programs to healthcare education. “We recognize a person’s wellbeing doesn’t just mean their health – and we aim to support JRLA students as holistically as possible,” Riney said of future collaboration efforts.

Henry Ford Health also made it clear that community benefit was a driving factor in repurposing the former hospital. “We’ve long said that it was crucial to find a use for the former Kingswood Hospital that contributed to the betterment of our community, and we couldn’t have found a better partner to make that a reality than the Jalen Rose Leadership Academy,” Riney noted. He called it “a wonderful feeling knowing that generations of future leaders – even future Henry Ford Health nurses or physicians – will walk those halls” once the building is filled with students. In other words, today’s JRLA scholars could someday be the Henry Ford doctors and nurses serving Detroit – a full-circle outcome that benefits everyone.

From Henry Ford’s perspective, donating the Kingswood facility was a far better choice than selling or demolishing it. The hospital, which had been a 100-bed psychiatric center, shut its doors in January 2025 after nearly 60 years of service. The health system weighed several options for the empty site, but ultimately chose to give it away for free to JRLA, seeing the school as the perfect steward for the property. This kind of cross-sector generosity is unusual, and both parties hope it can serve as a model for how institutions can team up to solve community challenges.

It’s worth noting that charter schools like JRLA operate with limited resources – they receive state per-pupil funding for basics, but no public funding for facilities. “We get zero state funding, so to have the support of Henry Ford Health and the donation of a facility just allows us to expand what we’re doing. It’s an incredible undertaking,” Jalen Rose explained, underscoring how critical this support is for the academy’s growth. Indeed, without this kind of help, a school of JRLA’s size might never afford a 70,000-square-foot campus on its own. The JRLA news of the donation has therefore been met with an outpouring of gratitude from the school community and education leaders, who see it as a big win for Detroit kids.

The announcement itself turned into a celebration at the Detroit Golf Club. At the 15th Annual JRLA Celebrity Golf Classic – JRLA’s signature fundraising event – local luminaries and supporters cheered the news. NFL Hall-of-Famer Charles Woodson was on hand and praised Rose’s commitment to education. “For him to be doing this for this long, and the amount of kids’ lives that he’s affected – man, I just take my hat off to him,” Woodson said of his longtime friend’s educational efforts. The celebrity golf outing has become an important tradition for JRLA, helping raise funds (the school is aiming to secure that $20 million for renovations) and rallying community support for the academy’s mission. Rose noted that events like these are “paramount to what we do” – not only do they generate dollars, but they also shine a spotlight on JRLA’s successes and needs.

   

A New Chapter for Metro Detroit Education

In a city that has long grappled with educational disparities, this public-private alliance is a ray of hope. By converting a once-shuttered hospital into a vibrant learning hub, JRLA and Henry Ford Health are showing what’s possible when vision, commitment, and investment intersect. Detroit charter high schools often face steep challenges, but here we have a hometown healthcare system and a hometown hero joining forces to lift up local students. It’s the kind of feel-good, innovative solution that Metro Detroiters love to see – a win-win for the community.

There’s still plenty of work ahead to transform the old hospital halls into bright classrooms, science labs, and student spaces. But with the blueprint drawn and the passion in place, now JRLA has the physical space to match its ambitions. The academy’s leaders and supporters are eager to get started on renovations and make this vision a reality by 2027. As Jalen Rose puts it, “we’ve got the passion, and now we’ve got the space.


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