Improving student attendance and truancy prevention have always been areas of concern for educators, as well as, community members, and legislators. Students who are not in school cannot learn, and frequently drop out. Truant students often engage in high-risk behaviors that eventually entangle them in the juvenile justice system. Since 1986, the National Dropout Prevention Center/Network (NDPC/N) has conducted and analyzed research, sponsored extensive workshops, and collaborated with a variety of practitioners to further the mission of reducing America?s dropout rate by meeting the needs of youth in at-risk situations, including students with disabilities. Students report a variety of reasons for not attending school, being truant, and dropping out of school; therefore, the solutions are multidimensional. The NDPC/N has identified Fifteen Effective Strategies that have the most positive impact on the high school graduation rate. These strategies appear to be independent, but actually work well together and frequently overlap. Although they can be implemented as stand-alone programs (i.e., mentoring or family engagement projects), positive outcomes will result when school districts develop a program improvement plan that encompasses most or all of these strategies. These strategies have been successful in all school levels from K-12 and in rural, suburban, or urban centers. Although the Fifteen Effective Strategies were developed to be used to prevent students from dropping out, they are also pertinent to the issues of attendance improvement and truancy prevention. The strategies are grouped into four general categories: school and community perspective, early interventions, basic core strategies, and making the most of instruction.