Despite the clarion call from educational leaders, scholars, and doctoral students for educational leadership preparation to provide learning experiences to ensure students persist to become transformative school leaders, most educational leadership programs struggle to make this happen. The purpose of this reflective essay is to capture how converting a doctoral educational leadership program from a quarter system to a semester system afforded two faculty members the opportunity to redesign their doctoral program into one that specifically focuses on social justice. We not only capture how the semester conversion process afforded us the opportunity to ensure the program was tied to preparing transformative school leaders, but highlight how it allowed us to implement programmatic supports predicated on ensuring that more students graduate. We believe the insights we gleaned from redesigning the Ed.D. program will assist other educational leadership faculty and directors. They will be able to graduate more leaders who are equipped to build socially-just schools and solve complex problems facing the communities they serve.