Teacher-student relationships (TSRs) have important implications for building trust, motivation, and engagement and improving both behavior and academic achievement. What about students' relationships with principals? Given the scarcity of literature on the PSR, research on the TSR was used to buttress the findings from this empirical study of the PSR to describe more nuanced implications and deeper understandings of the influence and impact principals have on students and vice versa. This work resulted in a two-part series. Part I, included in this issue, focuses heavily on the literature review and detailed findings of the study. Part II, included in a forthcoming issue, embeds the study results more firmly within theoretical underpinnings and extends them toward establishing a new conceptual framework for the PSR and a new dimension of scholarship on effective school leadership. Qualitative narrative inquiry was chosen as the methodological approach. Interviews with four principals and three of their former students along with observations of each principal provided the data set. Findings from Part I, reveal nine dominant themes indicating that the PSR is a primary consideration for many principals not only for the personal satisfaction of interacting with students but also because of the belief that the relationships significantly contribute to principals' ability to effectively meet their many responsibilities. Part I findings, which expose some of the challenges and complications in developing healthy PSRs, were then integrated with the synthesis of the existing literature in order to briefly propose a new framework for exploring the phenomenon.