In this article, the Kansas State University Chair of the Department of Educational Leadership reviews the strong history of his department's university and public school partnerships and the impact these partnerships have had on leadership preparation programs. Almost 30 years ago, Kansas State University foresaw the power of partnerships with public schools in preparing new generations of formal school leaders. Partnerships for leadership development, known as leadership academies, took root, prospered, evolved, and multiplied, all having the purpose of developing formal school leadership capacity and leadership succession plans. These academies also broadened to include other leadership recognition, notably distributed leadership for systemic strength and optimization of human capital resources. These outcomes were possible only because all partners were committed to unusual risk and were insightful in rearranging tradition to accommodate new models of inquiry, new models of institutional support, and new models of thinking about authority, power, and hierarchies in the educational world.