Both the Organization of American Historians (OAH) and The American Historical Association (AHA) have engaged in the debate about reform and improvement of pre-collegiate history education, which has been a hot political issue at least since the 1983 publication of "A Nation at Risk." Both the OAH and the AHA support initiatives that promote the mission of K-16 linkage and outreach to pre-collegiate institutions and educators. While many historians support the call for more collaboration between K-12 and university educators, few have expounded upon the two-way gains made through such networking and outreach. Fewer still have articulated the need for "sustained" engagement by professional historians who understand the everyday challenges of in-service (and pre-service) teachers, and for validation of such work as a legitimate means of disseminating new scholarship and knowledge. Noting the significant role historians have to play in forming an educated democracy, James O. Horton, president of the OAH, called upon those in the historical profession, and those in institutional administration, to consider the challenges confronted by academics that endeavor to educate a broad public audience. Horton sounded the call for individual scholars and institutions to contemplate how they reward or punish academics who reach beyond the halls of academe to touch a broader public. Recognizing that much is at risk for historians, especially those who are untenured, and stretch the traditional boundaries of recognized professional research activity, Horton called on all of those in higher education to recognize and ameliorate the impediments to public outreach. Yet even if Horton's challenge is embraced broadly within and beyond an institution, questions remain about what can and should be done to improve the teaching of history in order to develop the historical content knowledge of younger learners and the broader public audience. This author, an educator who had taught at the secondary level for seventeen years prior to moving to the university level, possesses an important set of perspectives on the efforts to improve the historical content knowledge of teachers and the challenges Horton and others have addressed. As an untenured historian she states that her engagement with Project TEACH, a three-year TAH grant, may provide useful examples for others as well as some answers to the questions posed in this article. Her experience indicates that, if educators challenge themselves to become truly engaged in public outreach and reciprocal exchange with K-12 educators, they may well discover a venue not only for sharing the most up-to-date scholarship drawn from their own research, but also a means to strengthen their own teaching and engagement with students. (Contains 9 notes.)