April 22, 2026
Transylvania County School Board Member Greg Cochran speaks about the changes to the school day at the April 20, 2026 meeting. Transylvania County Schools
By Jonathan Rich
BrevardBeagle.com
Transylvania County teachers have made their opinions known about their school system’s recent decision to add 10 minutes to the overall school day and the school system has now scrapped that plan effective Monday, April 27.
At the April 20 school board meeting, Transylvania County Schools Superintendent Lisa Fletcher said a total of 281 Transylvania County teachers had responded to a survey about the plan adopted on March 25 to add 10 minutes of instruction to the entire school day.
Now, after 82.6% percent of the teachers polled on the longer school day responded that this was a change they do not want for staff or students, the school day will go back to its previous schedule.
“They would prefer to wait and see if make-up time is actually needed,” Fletcher told the school board Monday night of the new survey results. “Not only do teachers not want it as their first choice, but a significant portion does not want it at all. You take both of those questions together and they point in the same direction: the teachers are not in favor of extending the school day … I should have asked them first, but I didn’t.”
At the March 25th School Board meeting, Superintendent Fletcher asked the School Board to add 10 minutes to the regular school day in order to create a surplus throughout the school year without needing “Saturday school” or changing any scheduled time off for Thanksgiving, fall, winter, or spring breaks.
At that time, Fletcher said that plan would provide five additional instructional days on the calendar without changing the overall school year with the additional 10 minutes of instruction spread throughout each day rather than be added as a single block of time.
Transylvania County Schools has already used all its time this year for weather-related closures, but after discussion about its teachers’ responses to this new longer school day for the remainder of the school calendar as well as for the 2026-27 school year, students will return to the previous daily dismissal times that had in early March.
“Based on the survey and feedback we’ve heard from teachers, my recommendation is we remove the 10-minute addition to the school day,” Fletcher said. “The data shows out teachers, by a wide margin, prefer a wait-and-see approach and frankly we’re not even sure if we will fall short of the required instructional hours for (next) year because that year hasn’t started. If we do get to the point where we need to make up time, I would recommend we come back to the board with options this time with the teachers’ input already in hand before any decision is made.”
During the initial March 25 vote, School Board members Ruth Harris, Greg Cochran and Ricky Lambert voted to add 10 minutes to each school day and Board member Chris Weiner voted against this change.
School Board Chair Tanya Dalton did not vote either for or against Fletcher’s March proposal and Monday night said changing things back was the right thing to do.
“I understood the need for it, but I kind of preferred the wait-and-see approach,” Dalton said Monday night. “The teachers have absolutely 100-percent spoken and we have been to eight of the nine schools. We have discussed and we have apologized.”
“It was just a communication error, if you will,” Cochran said, explaining that when he asked if school staff wanted this change he was referring to the school system’s administration staff and not the teaching staff from the county’s nine public schools. “I’ll take the blame for that. When I said ‘staff’ I was talking about one group, but they were thinking about another.”
“That was a misunderstanding, but now they (the teachers) have been asked and so I hope to do away with the 10 minutes that we’re currently doing,” Dalton concluded Monday night.
“I did ask the prinicipals if it would be hard to go back to the previous schedule,” Fletcher interjected. “They said, ‘Not at all.’”
Harris made a motion to end the current policy and revert back to the previous schedule.
“This will be to end it now for this year as well as to suspend it for next year,” Cochran said before a unanimous vote by those in attendance repealed the change to the bell schedule for all public Transylvania County Schools starting Monday, April 27.