Sienna Bucu: A Voice for the Faceless

By: Noah Benjamin Dobson | Written on 10.29.2020

On the outskirts of Harry R. Cooke Jr. Memorial Field, hundreds of students draped in maroon and gold caps and gowns took their last seats for their final school hour. Though the sun’s rays failed to mirror their glee as it was engulfed by grey, dreary clouds, it did not matter - their excitement radiated through their claps and cheers of young souls ready to begin their new life. Their last task was simple - celebrate and say goodbye, and so they did with a handshake, a smile or a hug. The Class of 2018 had graduated, caps flung into the air in hoorah, and bodies marched themselves across the green turf of the football field - no was expected nor no longer required to return. Yet one did; fast forward two years later, there lies impaled in the green grass a sign that reads - Bucu for BOE.

“No one told me I could run for Board of Ed. A lot of people were like, ‘Are you sure you can do this? Are you sure you can do this? You’re a college student…’ Yes, I know I can do it. I know that it’s going to be crazy. But I’m going to do it anyway.”

Focused, determined, caring, and a “workforce” as she puts it, are what can best describe twenty-one-year-old Sienna Bucu of Union, New Jersey. Born and raised in Union, Sienna has long been affiliated with the Union Public School district, attending its schools such as Livingston, C-5, Kawameeh and graduating as part of the Class of 2018 at Union High School. Beyond academics and the extracurricular activities, she has been heavily involved in major advocacy projects since the 8th grade. Examples include the Love 146 charity event in Kawameeh Middle School which raised raised over two-thousand dollars for measures against child sex trafficking. Another was helping facilitate the Walkout (a response to the Parkland shooting) in which 1000 students marched to Union’s Town Hall on March 14, 2018 and 40 students traveled to DC to demonstrate their want for safer schools and gun control while honoring the students lossed because to her and many others - one death is one too many.

Now, the college student majoring in Art Studio and minoring in Philosophy at Brandeis University, is running for one of the three free seats on the Board of Education.

“...I’ve been going to board meetings since I was a senior in high school...and I haven’t left since because I saw that they have such an impact on daily lives. When we think about elected officials, we don’t think about...we think that they’re so far removed from us. But something like the Board of Ed, their decisions are implemented and directly affect students right away.”

The Board of Education is a council of nine, focused on handling three priorities that can greatly affect the state of the educational system. The first is to assign a superintendent - a task they will be doing this year as the current superintendent is retiring on January 1st - and to stay vigilant of the superintendent’s progress. The second is to establish goals for the district every year in which are then assessed by all members of the Board of Education as to whether the set goals have been achieved. And the third responsibility is to “write policy, and implement policy where they see fit.”

With a seat amongst eight other individuals, Sienna hopes to amplify student voices, assure they receive the necessary resources on a continuum, and mend a continuous disconnect between the Board of Education and the students thus resulting in a much more tacit-minded relationship between the two groups.

To do so, her focus is ensure that all resources are accessible to all students and ensure that tax dollars are put to work for these students in order to prevent further loss of resources such as when the schools encountered a reduction of force and a loss of new, energetic teachers. Her resolution is to focus on student necessities first like an extra Student Assistance Counselor, implement a timeline or roadmap of the budget to ensure everyone is aware and not surprised with the current budget, provide budget information that is better understood to the public with a better breakdown of spending, and to utilize the grant writer more effectively.

Another goal is to reassess current modes of discipline in our schools and realize equitable education through their practices. With the knowledge that discipline can be based on a student’s perception and a student’s GPA status, Sienna’s resolution is to look into alternative ways of discipline while keeping in mind why students are acting out. An example she gave is “transformative and restorative policies when we think about suspensions when it comes to substance abuse,” such as “reduction in punitive measures by 50%, with the addition of transformative and restorative policies by 20%.”

Sienna also seeks to improve communication throughout the district beginning with changing the cultural landscape of how each individual speaks to each other after recognizing the council’s current disarray from their rowdiness and taking things personally.

“First and foremost, I'm going to practice what I preach, right? I'm, I'm going to be communicative as a board member; everything that I can say to you, I will say to you, you know, I'm also going to listen. Communication isn't just about talking...you have to be able to listen. And that means listening to people who you don't agree with. That means listening to people who make you angry.”

Other methods to improve communication is to change how questions are asked by providing insight as to what students currently care about and asking about the different type of student experiences, push for quicker responses to questions, scheduling the Township Meetings and Board of Ed meetings on two separate days to help increase parent involvement for no attendee has to pick which meeting to attend to over the other, and search for a potential superintendent who is a strong communicator and who will talk to the faculty, students and their parents.

With her presence on the board, she hopes that she could utilize it to bring a level of comfort and certainty to encourage more students to speak out at the Board of Ed meetings to share their current issues and current experiences, and utilize her experiences to give current information to parents about the school system with regard to areas like the PARCC, SATs, the conditions of the school from a student perspective, etc.

However, her biggest concern is implementing policies to assist with mental health.

“Mental health is my number one bullet on my flyers - it's the number one thing I talk about. I think when something happens, we're very aware of it. So like, right now Corona is making the world a much different place. And so everyone is screaming social emotional learning, but it doesn't mean that they have an understanding of what that looks like in practice.”

“So that is going to be my first goal, that is going to be my foremost goal. And that's because I know what it's like when it's not there and how the chips fall when people are not being taken care of. You can't learn if your brain is not in the room. You would never put a kid in who is in excruciating pain from their leg, right? So like, I can use that as a concrete example - when I broke my leg.”

I got every single thing that I needed. I got the five minute pass. I got...I was allowed to be in the library. And when I told them, the library is not the place I want it to be, they moved me - anything that I needed; like they could look at my leg and say, ‘this girl can't carry her backpack,’ even though I could, and they would take it. You don't see mental illness.

So those resources, those things are just as real to the person experiencing a mental illness when you're severely depressed. But people don't look and say, ‘What can I carry for this person?’ Because they can't see it. So for me, I'm always going to highlight that because it is something you can't see until it's too late.

A long time friend and classmate of Sienna Bucu, twenty-one-year-old Caitlyn Dy of Union, New Jersey reflected on whether the resources Union schools had could effectively assist with issues of mental health.

“No, because I personally had to deal with mental health issues during high school and it was during my senior year I was finally diagnosed. After being hospitalized and coming back to school, I didn’t feel safe and there wasn’t much support while coming back,” stated Caitlyn.

Based on her calculations, Sienna saw that with only two Student Assistance counselors, they will see 90 students every two weeks (without a lunch break), in which is a small fraction “to how many people are affected by mental illness.” Sienna’s resolution is training all members of the faculty on how to spot, how to deal with a student in crisis, how to detect in advance as to whether a student’s mental health is suffering before it leads to further damage, and then taking them to where they can receive the necessary resources. With each staff member having the acquired skill set to help a student, this will give students a way to feel safe within the entire school while also preventing students from falling behind and being written off as bad students while also preventing limitations on access to help.

“When you get flagged for drug tests, you need to take in a certain amount of time; there's a timeframe like from you getting fined in school to when you need to take your drug test. And one of the things that they do is they have the Student Assistance Counselor go with the student to go get drug tested. That could be any faculty member who is designated by the principal, but it is the Student Assistance counselor, which makes some sense, but also shows a lack of access, because if it takes three hours for students to pee, that is three hours that the counselor is no longer in the building. That's three hours of appointments that they have to cancel. That's a student in crisis; possibly who doesn't get access to a counselor.”

Despite the position’s intense expectations, responsibility is nothing new to Sienna having handled various responsibilities in the past, evident from her continuing through her academic journey as a high performing student while juggling activities such as playing softball, field hockey, basketball to being part of plays or helping paint the sets to being part of Student councils and Honor societies and helping other students with their advocacy missions, such as a student named Josh who was planning a march for racial equity.

Though she has confidence in her effectiveness and in her experience, Sienna is not without humility and the awareness of the weight of responsibility she will gain if elected as part of the Board of Ed.

“It's gonna be really hard...I am not naive, and thinking like, I'm gonna go in, and I'm going to save Union schools, that is a naive approach. It takes five board members to make any policy go through, right, it's a majority of the board, you cannot do anything alone,” Sienna stated.

The necessity of teamwork is all too familiar to Sienna and has not been any more realized than during the month-long stages of organizing the Walkout. Sienna alongside Mekhi Rivers, Sabrina Prevost, Temi Adanlawo, Caitlin Medeiros and other eighteen-year-olds were met with heavy pushback from walking from the school to town hall due to liability and political issues, being pulled out of class for meetings, keeping up with constant calls and emails during and after-school, and the challenge of finding the time to sell t-shirts as it wasn’t school sanctioned. With a firm stance and coffee running through their veins, 600 students were sold T-Shirts that stated “Enough is Enough” raising money for the DC trip to March for our Lives and succeeding in the efforts for students to march to Town Hall.

“No one could have done that by themselves. And we raised a couple thousand dollars. Like it was a big deal. Yeah, so like that was insane. And it all happened so fast, which is cool. But it also shows how much students are capable of.”

Because of this she also believes that this is not an area that should disregard help from either adults and students, and should never be one-sided - not a council exclusive for adults and not a council made up of only “nine twenty-year olds.”

To her you need both to “effectuate change” - an ideal that can be reflected in her growth in maturity from the days she was a ten-year-old-girl wanting to be recognized as thirty-year-old to now being a young adult who sees that being young and having an old soul is not mutually exclusive.

Even if not trusted due to her age, none of the difficulty and challenges will deter her from her mission - remembering her own experiences attending the Union public schools.

“...I am doing this for the kids - only reason - I’m doing this is for the kids...because I was getting needed help. And I didn’t know how to do it, and other people did. And now I know. And I’m going to try and do it for other people.

“The vast majority of my experiences were positive. That's not to say that there weren't challenges and there weren't things that I was angry at because I didn't think that they were efficient, or I didn't think that they were necessary. But one of the other reasons that I'm doing this that I didn't highlight is I got everything from Union schools. And I mean everything because my teachers knew me and they cared about me, and they never let me quit. Not once, even when I was like, ‘No, I'm done...there's no way I can't do anything anymore, it's over. Book closed.’”

“No one ever gave up on me. And that takes a lot of emotional work for my teachers. They're angels. And I want every kid to have that experience.”

As November 3rd draws closer and ballots roll in, Sienna continues her campaign, driving for eight hours from Waltham, Massachusetts to Union, New Jersey every weekend, committed to making sure every student feels seen and heard.

Her dedication to the student body remains and will forever remain immense - mirroring the help and care she received from her teachers and other adults over the years.

“I actually have this binder that I carry with me everywhere. It's in this closet right here. And it's of letters...there's a couple of different advice letters and things like that. And like, I really hold on to them.”

“Without the relationships I have with my teachers, I wouldn't be at Brandeis without them telling me like, ‘You know, you should really apply to colleges, like, that's the thing you should do,’ and angsty senior year me was like, ‘No, I'm fine. I could do everything by myself, you know.’ And so having those relationships really, like saved me. And so for them, I'm like, always grateful.”

And it is emulated by the various advocacies she has performed on a larger scale all the way down to the individual.

“I also think that like, one of my crowning achievements of my whole life was always having chocolate in my purse. So when someone looked sad, they were getting a chocolate from my purse - and that was teachers, students, anyone. I would throw it across the room in the middle of the class if I feel like you needed it...You can’t change everyone’s problems, but you can show them that they’re seen and they’re not alone.”

“Sienna was always someone who I could talk to regarding anything. She made me feel as if I had someone on my side, who genuinely wanted to help. I am glad she is running for the Board of Education. I feel like her goals and her vision can help schools and students with their needs,” Caitlyn expressed.

As the interview came close to an end, Sienna parted with these words of inspiration for those who also sought to make a difference within this world.

“Making a difference doesn’t mean that tomorrow the world is a whole different picture when you wake up...making a difference is down to the individual. So I know that even if you can’t see it...it doesn’t mean you’re not doing it. So like, don’t ever give up and always ask for help.”

“You can do all these things anyway, even if it’s crazy - and so just go for it. And along the way, if you fall, someone will be there to pick you up. And if not, call me, I’ll come pick you up.”