During the Obama/Duncan federal education policy era, grant programs emphasized school -- community, and university partnerships to address student needs in high poverty areas. Critics noted the over-representation of urban poverty regions as compared to rural areas. Meanwhile, researchers have contributed insight regarding methods for effective, sustainable collaboration. Yet, the school-university partnership literature also understates the particular issues associated with rural political culture identity, also called "placism," and associated complications given multiple federal agency definitions of rurality. Alongside the need for a systematic understanding of how multi-sector collaboration might serve rural education needs, a parallel educational accountability literature implicates school leaders as accountable agents for school and student success. Such implications suggest a need to reconcile the logic of school-university partnership, school leaders' accountability, and multi-sector service roles in addressing specific rural education needs. This paper uses a thematic, integrative literature review to first identify critical elements of sustainability within the nexus of political cultures between universities, rural schools, and other social service sectors. Then, we propose a logic model incorporating such elements into a sustainable university and school alliance dedicated to the development of school leaders' capacity for promoting equity in schooling for rural and underserved students.