Students transitioning from middle school to high school face a range of academic and social challenges. Academic content is more diverse and challenging, and its delivery is increasingly text based, requiring competence in literacy and problem-solving skill areas. Students entering 9th grade often struggle to find an appropriate peer group and may face challenges at home, hindering motivation and diminishing school engagement. The combined and interrelated challenges of poor achievement and low school engagement increase the likelihood of dropping out. This study addresses important educational problems by providing evidence to support the efficacy of implementing individualized reading instruction and a dropout prevention program separately and in conjunction in improving reading achievement and school engagement for secondary students most at risk for academic failure. The reading intervention Check and Connect (C&C) was developed for struggling adolescents and originally field tested with funding from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development. The dropout prevention intervention in this study used a modified version of Check and Connect. The two studies that comprise the evidence base for C&C were conducted in the Minneapolis metropolitan area and targeted a specific population (primarily African American males receiving special education services), indicating a need for replication with other populations. The results from the first two years of the study are statistically significant in favor of the treatment group for the variables of high importance including students' perceptions of their school engagement and reading-related outcomes. Specifically, participants in the intensive reading interventions--with and without C&C--significantly outperformed those in a randomized, untreated comparison on a standardized measure of reading comprehension, and students participating in the modified C&C treatments--with and without reading--reported higher levels of school engagement over time compared to students in the untreated comparison. A table is appended.