Paving the road to an A

In 2024, Shelley Baxter, principal of Gilbert Cuellar Sr. Elementary School, was struck speechless by the news that Cuellar had received an F rating. Though she had braced herself for it, the rating still felt like a blow. 

But Baxter did not wallow in self-pity. Instead, she treated the failing grade as a challenge.

“This doesn’t define us,” Baxter told her staff in those first hard conversations. “This just gives us a clear path. We know what we need. We have the teachers in place to do it, and so now we just need to get it done.”

Two years later, that same campus sits on the opposite end of the accountability spectrum with an A rating, a leap from the high 50s to an 89 and then, finally, to a 91 in 2026. Behind Cuellar’s transformation, though, is relentless data work punctuated by genuine joy for learning and a strong belief that students and teachers can rise to the challenge.

Baxter, who has spent 31 years in Dallas ISD, 18 of those in the classroom at Harrell Budd and W.W. Bushman (now Albert C. Black STEAM Academy) elementary schools, said her experience as a teacher shapes how she leads.

“Being in the classroom for 18 years, I had some really, really great principals, and I learned from those great principals on how I would want to treat somebody if I was in the same office,” she said. 

When the F rating arrived, morale could have collapsed, but Baxter refused to let that happen. She and her team focused first on mindset—among adults and children.

Staying “in a slump,” she told them, wasn’t going to get anyone out of it. Administrators began rewarding any movement in the right direction: certificates, “cougar bucks,” celebrations, and, on Fridays, she would walk into classrooms with a bubble machine to show how happy she was with their progress. 

At the same time, the academic work intensified. Baxter and her assistant principals made it a priority to be in classrooms, side by side with teachers, using the district curriculum without watering it down and digging into data constantly. Professional Learning Communities became focused, problem-solving sessions rather than calendar check-ins.

“We were intentional with our support,” Baxter said. 

During PLC time, teachers began doing classroom walks together. Some teachers volunteered their rooms as live models so colleagues could see effective instructional practices in action and debrief immediately afterward.

Students, too, became active participants in their own growth. Each child had a color-coded clip chart matching their STAAR goal band: Approaches, Meets, or Masters. After each assessment, students moved their own clips.

“If your goal was Approaches, you had a purple clip,” Baxter said. “If your purple clip was clipped into a green, I could come in there and see, ‘Hey, so and so is supposed to be down here in Approaches, but she’s up here on this green mark, which means Masters.’”

Even the hallways turned into a quiet kind of celebration. Students often stop administrators mid-walk to point out how far their clips had climbed.

The school’s culture of support involves other methods. Cuellar uses a house system based on the Ron Clark Academy House System, mixing bilingual and general education students across grades into five houses: Amistad, Nukumori, Rêveur, Isibindi, and Altruismo. Students go to specials with their house, building friendships beyond their homerooms and reinforcing a sense of belonging.

Any culture of shaming around performance, Baxter said, has been pushed out over time.

“That’s a culture we got rid of a few years ago,” Baxter. “Students all support each other.”

Families became partners in the turnaround, too. Baxter and her administrative team held individual conferences with every parent of third- through fifth-grade students, walking through detailed data sheets that showed where each child was, where they needed to be, and how families could help at home. 

“It took us about a month to have all the parent conferences,” Baxter said. “But it definitely paid off.”

Along the way, there were students whose stories came to symbolize the campus’s broader transformation. Baxter recalled one girl who had lost her mother in second grade. Her first few assessments in third grade did not go well, and she failed to pass the early checks. The staff rallied around her with small-group support and encouragement. By the time STAAR arrived, the student earned Meets in both reading and math.

“Putting that medal on her neck was incredible. She was so excited and so happy because she realized that she can overcome,” Baxter said.

The payoff came into focus during the spring STAAR simulation. Comparing the results to the previous year’s, Baxter and her team realized just how far the campus had come.

“We’re going to do it, guys,” she said she remembered thinking. “We’re going to make it there.”

In 2025, Cuellar celebrated the 89 as if it were an A, because for a school that had just climbed out of an F, it might as well have been. When the true A rating arrived earlier last month, the entire community—students, staff, even the crossing guards—received rings in a campus-wide celebration.

Looking ahead, Baxter is clear that the work doesn’t stop at one rating.

“We’re not going to take our foot off the gas,” she said. “The goal now is to maintain the A while pushing Domain 1 to 90 or above and tracking TELPAS progress so teachers know exactly which students need support.”

At the heart of it all is a simple belief she repeats often.

“The legacy I want to leave Cuellar is that they can do it,” she said. “We have the students and the teachers we need to be successful and to maintain the A. We will do it.”