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The concept of Just-In-Time Training (JITT) is to provide critical information specific to a public health crisis, allowing individuals to understand and respond to an urgent situation. The design of the JITT curriculum appropriate for school-aged children during the COVID-19 pandemic is vital, as every individual has a role to play in mitigating the spread of SARS-CoV-2. When working with various communities, considering culture and religion is essential, as aligning values and beliefs with the JITT curriculum’s objectives may significantly change the community’s behavior toward a public health crisis. In this narrative, we describe how a JITT curriculum for the COVID-19 pandemic, created in Maryland, US, and implemented in a Catholic school system, aligned with core Catholic social teachings. This alignment allowed for implementing and delivering the COVID-19 curriculum in Maryland’s Archdiocese Catholic school system, culminating in a medical-religious partnership that serves as a model for future public health crises.

The 2020 summer of protests for racial justice amid continued police violence coupled with the widening health disparities due to COVID-19 have made the need for social change and community-informed public health practice abundantly clear. Public health professionals need to combine public health knowledge with collaboration, communication, and reflection to address these health disparities and social injustices. Likewise, as public health educators, we need to develop curricula that train students in these complex skills in order to be effective practitioners. To do this, public health schools and programs should adopt critical service-learning as a central pedagogy in curricula because it is specifically designed to address our current crises with its combination of practice, research, and reflection that together aims for social change. As a means of institutionalizing the pedagogy, faculty can practice and advocate for resources as faculty champions of service-learning.

Background: Despite calls from professional organizations to prepare a nursing workforce with the requisite skills to address social determinants of health (SDOH), there is little guidance for nurse educators about how to actively promote student learning of these complex issues. Method: We applied a critical service-learning (CSL) pedagogy to enhance graduate public health nursing curriculum and support learner skill building in approaches to combat health disparities by addressing the underlying social conditions. Results: Course content and critical reflection activities were built incrementally across four courses and semesters to introduce and apply antioppressive frameworks, encourage students to examine their personal identities of privilege and oppression, and examine historical context and systems of power in public health settings. Conclusion: CSL supports student development of structural competence and their understanding of approaches that can dismantle inequitable systems by addressing SDOH that contribute to health disparities. [ J Nurs Educ . 2021;60(1):38–43.]

With the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic by the World Health Organization in March 2020, many elements of society were faced with attempting to assimilate public health recommendations for infectious control. Vital social organizations had to balance delivering their social services while attempting to stay up to date with COVID-19 information and comply with evolving regulations. In the realm of schools and school systems, guidance on how to best adapt to COVID-19 was often limited. School officials and staff had to assist with multiple public health crises as a consequence of the pandemic, from the pandemic’s transmission prevention strategies (e.g., face masks and physical distancing) to the recognition that students would have personal tragedies related to COVID-19. In this review, we highlight the process and feasibility of implementing an international COVID-19 school-based initiative over two years of the pandemic, the Health Education and Training (HEAT) Corps program.

The COVID-19 pandemic had forced schools and school-based partnerships in the US to re-imagine extracurricular activities while schools were closed for in-person learning. We highlight lessons learned from implementing the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Education Program (SNAP-Ed) virtually, a nutrition education program to improve nutrition literacy and skills among children, in a Maryland School of Nursing/K-8 Partnership school amid in-person school closures.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention define community engagement as “the process of working collaboratively with and through groups of people” in order to improve their health and well-being. Central to the field of public health, community engagement should also be at the core of the work of schools and programs of public health. This article reviews best practices and emerging innovations in community engagement for education, for research, and for practice, including critical service-learning, community-based participatory research, and collective impact. Leadership, infrastructure, and culture are key institutional facilitators of successful academic efforts. Major challenges to overcome include mistrust by community members, imbalance of power, and unequal sharing of credit. Success in this work will advance equity and improve health in communities all around the world.

Public health graduate education helps future practitioners to develop relevant skills, yet students have few opportunities to gain experience with community-level public health practice beyond work with health departments. Although the importance of academic-community partnerships is mentioned in the classroom, many students believe that they lack the time to pursue hands-on public health work in their local communities. Despite this, community-based organizations recognize the potential benefits of collaborating with public health students. This article describes the inception and implementation of the Connection Community Consultant Group, a program designed to increase interactions between students of public health and community-based organizations as well as to provide a forum for the application of students' developing public health knowledge and skills. Students who participate in the Connection gain public health practice experience in areas such as environmental health, healthcare access, health education, and violence prevention. The Connection serves as a model program for a mutually beneficial exchange: Graduate students can develop public health practice skills, and community-based organizations can capitalize on these skills to meet short-term needs.