{"id":56513,"date":"2025-12-09T20:28:14","date_gmt":"2025-12-09T20:28:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/56513\/"},"modified":"2025-12-09T20:28:14","modified_gmt":"2025-12-09T20:28:14","slug":"school-director-makes-return-in-bensalem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/56513\/","title":{"rendered":"School Director Makes Return In Bensalem"},"content":{"rendered":"

BENSALEM TOWNSHIP, PA \u2014 She’s a lawyer, an actor, and once again, a school board member.<\/p>\n

You may remember Rachel Fingles. <\/p>\n

She served on the Bensalem Township School Board from 2017 to 2021, during a time when the Republican party ruled the roost and when the COVID pandemic raised fears among parents, school staff, board members, and children.<\/p>\n

Fingles rode the wave of a Democratic party sweep<\/a> through the council and the school board, surprising results in a town known as a Republican stronghold. <\/p>\n

Democrats won four school board seats in the November general election, flipping a 5-4 GOP majority to an 8-1 Democratic board.<\/p>\n

Fingles told Patch that she loved her time on the school board, but decided not to run for re-election as COVID caused friction and tension in the community regarding mask mandates.<\/p>\n

For Fingles, the decision \u2014 while difficult \u2014 was sensible for this simple reason.<\/p>\n

“I was getting death threats. It was so bad. I would have run again. But I was so burned out over COVID,” said Fingles, who also served on the Bucks County Intermediate Unit 1 board. “Once the death threats started, that was it.”<\/p>\n

The nearly 40-year-old Fingles is a busy woman these days.<\/p>\n

Besides rejoining the school board, Fingles is a partner at Cantwell Law Offices, practicing family law in Bucks and Montgomery counties and in Philadelphia.<\/p>\n

She also acts with her two daughters, ages 14 and 11, who attend Bensalem Township schools. All three will perform two-to-three shows each year at the Music Mountain Theater in Lambertville.<\/p>\n

Fingles said more work needs to be done in the school district to support the arts.<\/p>\n

“We have great music programs,” she said. “But we have no theater programs besides the high school. We need to get kids interested in performance theater.”<\/p>\n

Fingles also plans to rejoin the school policies committee. She also has some other improvements throughout the school district.<\/p>\n

“Priority One is ensuring that kids get what they need,” she said. “We need to support the teachers. They are with our children more than parents.”<\/p>\n

Fingles was pleased by the run the Democratic party made in the November general election.<\/p>\n

“I believe we ran a very serious, aggressive campaign. We were very in touch with the feeling that was on the ground,” she said. “We did it with hard work and really smart people.”<\/p>\n

Shre understands that her party has the opportunity to accomplish a great deal before the next school board election.<\/p>\n

“We know that we have two years to do some good things,” Fingles said. “We will do what’s best. The school population deserves a solid future. We can’t predict what’s going on at the federal level. But we want to put a finger on the dam before it bursts.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

(Allie Brown Photography)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BENSALEM TOWNSHIP, PA \u2014 She’s a lawyer, an actor, and once again, a school board member. You may…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":56514,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[191,193,192,194],"class_list":["post-56513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-bensalem","tag-bensalem","tag-bensalem-headlines","tag-bensalem-news","tag-bensalem-township"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56513"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56513\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56514"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}