Rhea Central Elementary School Band Director Touched the Lives of Her Students

Former band students remember Nancy Burkhalter from her years at Rhea Central Elementary School in Dayton, Tennessee, where she was their band director and music teacher. Looking back now, it is clear that the part of her life they knew at Rhea Central was only one chapter in a much larger and rather remarkable story. I recently came across her obituary following her death on June 18, 2026, at the age of 78, and it led me to learn much more about the woman many former students simply knew as Mrs. Burkhalter.

Nancy Anna Burkhalter was born October 2, 1947, the daughter of Roy Greenwood Burkhalter Jr. and Lois Lee Brooks Burkhalter. Music was much more than a subject she taught. She was a highly trained musician who earned master’s degrees in Music and Music Education from the University of South Carolina and continued her musical studies at the Royal Academy of Music in London. She was also an accomplished flutist and performed as a flutist and soloist with the Columbia Philharmonic Orchestra.

For approximately the first 15 years of her professional life, Nancy worked as a musician and educator. Her teaching career included Bryan College and the University of Tennessee, along with schools in Richland and Lexington counties in South Carolina. Somewhere within those years was the chapter that brought her to Dayton and Rhea Central.

The 1980 Rhea Central Elementary School yearbook includes Nancy’s photograph and lists her among the faculty, providing direct documentation that she was at Rhea Central during the 1979–1980 school year. Former band students remember her as the school’s band director and music teacher, with recollections placing her at Rhea Central from around the mid-1970s into the early 1980s. Her exact first and last years at the school have not yet been documented, so those dates remain approximate.

What I found especially interesting was what Nancy did after her career in music and education. At some point she began volunteering at the Columbia Free Medical Clinic, and that experience apparently changed the direction of her professional life. She returned to school, entered the field of pharmacy and earned a Doctor of Clinical Pharmacy degree. She eventually became an internationally recognized Certified Diabetes Educator.

Her work in medicine went far beyond what her former students might have imagined from knowing her as their band director. According to the information published about her life, the Department of Defense selected Nancy as one of only 24 international specialists involved in developing diabetes-care protocols for the U.S. Army. She developed what was known as the “Three Legged Stool” model for diabetes treatment, which became part of military diabetes guidelines. Her work also extended to asthma education, with programs she developed being adopted by the U.S. Army Surgeon General. She went on to lecture at national nursing conferences, Department of Defense Joint Forces Pharmacy seminars and other professional medical meetings.

Nancy received considerable recognition for this work. Among her honors were four U.S. Army Coins of Recognition, including Challenge and Commander’s Coins of Excellence. She also received the 1999 Ralph D. Arnold Army Pharmacy Award – Mel Liter Army Pharmacy Clinical Pharmacists Award, an award for Excellence in Pharmacy Administration in 1993, and the top award in a national “Design A Drug” competition that same year.

There was also much more to Nancy than her professional accomplishments. She maintained a second home in Black Mountain, North Carolina, where she enjoyed working on the house and tending gardens of daylilies and peonies. After retiring, she traveled extensively, visiting places that included Italy, Turkey, Mexico, Europe and the Caribbean, as well as destinations throughout the United States.

Learning all of this gives a completely different perspective on someone remembered by generations of students from their school days. Back then, she was Mrs. Burkhalter, their band director at Rhea Central. Her students may not have known the full extent of her musical background, and they certainly could not have known that she would eventually leave music education for an entirely different career and make important contributions to pharmacy, diabetes education and military medicine.

That is one of the fascinating things about going back through old yearbooks and researching the people pictured in them. A single black-and-white faculty photograph captures only one moment in a person’s life. Nancy Burkhalter’s photograph in the 1980 Rhea Central yearbook preserves the woman her students knew at that particular time, while the story of what came before and after that photograph reveals just how remarkable her life and career became.

Sources: Dr. Nancy Anna Burkhalter obituary, Dignity Memorial/Dunbar Funeral Home, Columbia, South Carolina, 2026; Rhea Central Elementary School Yearbook, 1980, Faculty, p. 2, from the personal collection of Dean Wilson.

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