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Over half of public school buildings across the country fail to provide adequate conditions for students to learn and school staff to work. Prior research has established an evidence base of associations between high-quality school building facilities and student, staff, school, and community health and education outcomes. Recognizing this research and the need for facility improvements, Maryland has approved the 21st Century School Buildings Program, which is paid for by Baltimore City Public Schools (City Schools), the State of Maryland, and the City of Baltimore. The program will invest close to $1 billion to renovate or replace over two dozen school buildings. City Schools, with support from the Fund for Educational Excellence, selected the RAND Corporation to study the impact of new school buildings on student, staff, school, and community outcomes.

The goal of this first phase was to collect data prior to the start of the Baltimore 21st Century Building Program and conduct initial exploratory analyses of data from treatment schools (i.e., schools slated for renovation or rebuilding) and comparison schools (i.e., schools with similar student and school characteristics but not slated for renovation or rebuilding). The data compiled here are audits of the street segments immediately surrounding those target schools. These observations from Spring 2016 were collected in an effort to document the conditions and features of the neighborhoods prior to school building renovations.

This data collection describes baseline neighborhood characteristics prior to the 21st Century Buildings School Program. For more information about the Baltimore City Schools and the 21st Century School Building Program, please visit the 21st Century Schools website.

The American Health Values Survey (AHVS) was conducted by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago in order to develop a typology of Americans based on their health values and beliefs. The survey, of more than 10,000 adults from five individual communities, examined values and beliefs related to health at both the individual as well as societal levels. The community surveys sought to compare differences between the local typologies, but also to investigate any similarities with national typology groups. The survey assessed the importance of health in:

• day-to-day personal life (i.e. the amount of effort spent on disease prevention as well as appropriate seeking of medical care);
• equity, the value placed on the opportunity to succeed generally in life as well as on health equity;
• social solidarity, the importance of taking into account the needs of others as well as personal needs;
• health care disparities, views about how easy/hard it is for African Americans, Latinos and low-income Americans to get quality health care;
• and, the importance of the social determinants of health.

In addition, the survey also explored views about how active government should be in health; collective efficacy, the ease of affecting positive community change by working with others; and health-related civic engagement e.g. the support of health charities and organizations working on health issues.

There are public-use and restricted-use versions of the data provided for each of the five sentinel communities participating in this study. Although each site differs on the number of respondents as listed below, each data file contains the same 143 variables for each site and version of the data. The only difference between the public-use versus restricted-use versions of the data is the variable ZIP, which was MASKED in the public-use version.

• DS1 and DS2 - Baltimore, Maryland: 2,139
• DS3 and DS4 - Maricopa County, Arizona: 2,247
• DS5 and DS6 - Stockton, California: 2,127
• DS7 and DS8 - Mobile, Alabama: 1,821
• DS9 and DS10 - North Central counties in Nebraska: 2,846