Search results

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.

This repeated cross-sectional national telephone survey of households was conducted as part of the evaluation of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Urban Health Initiative (UHI), a long-term effort to improve the health, safety, and well-being of children and youth in five economically distressed cities in the United States: Baltimore, MD, Detroit, MI, Oakland, CA, Philadelphia, PA, and Richmond, VA. The UHI Survey of Adults and Youth (SAY) included a variety of questions, asked of both parents and their 10-18 year old children, regarding children's health, safety, perceptions of neighborhoods and schools, family relations, quality of city services, and other issues. SAY surveyed 3 types of households -- households without children, households with children aged 0-9 years, and households with children aged 10-18 years -- in up to 14 geographic areas, including the 5 UHI program cities, 9 comparison cities demographically similar to the UHI cities, the suburban regions of these cities, the most populous 100 United States cities, and the rest of the country. There were 3 waves of SAY fielded during the course of the UHI project: during the 1998-1999, 2001-2002, and 2004-2005 school years.

The vast majority of survey items in SAY are from other national surveys, including the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, and the National Health Interview Survey. The survey instrument was revised between waves, but about 50 percent of the instrument remained the same across all 3 waves. All adult respondents (both parents and nonparents) were first asked questions about services and general conditions in their city. Parents were then asked additional questions about their children, their children's schools, child-related services in their communities, neighborhood and city conditions, and brief question segments about randomly selected children in various age groups. If one or more 10-18 year olds lived in the household, and if the parent respondent gave permission, up to two 10-18 year olds in the household were then interviewed about their schools, neighborhoods, peer group activities and behaviors, out-of-school time, relations with adults, and other topics.

There is a separate data file for each wave, and each record contains all of the data for a given household, i.e., the data collected from one adult and up to two 10-18 year olds.