A transportation company serving the Little Rock School District is moving ahead with a plan to swap out diesel school buses for electric ones after receiving over $18 million from the Environmental Protection Agency. Plans call for ditching 50 fossil fuel-powered school buses in favor of electric ones starting in January.
“I’m very proud of the leadership of the Little Rock School District who want to step forward and be a leader in this kind of clean technology for our students and for our community,” said Linda Young, the grant manager for the Little Rock School District.
Kevin Matthews, the head of electrification at First Student, said that the electric buses should be transporting students by late 2025.
First Student is the largest operator of school buses in America, and the company contracts with the Little Rock School District. Matthews told the Arkansas Times that the company operates 171 buses in total for Little Rock students.
The buses will be used for transportation locally, according to Linda Young, who led the effort to win the grant for Little Rock. Entegrity Consulting, an energy consulting firm in Little Rock, partnered with Little Rock School District to apply for the grant and will be building the charging stations and the bus depot that will hold the electric buses. The Little Rock Fire Department will assist in training the bus drivers, according to Young.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean School Bus Program was created by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and provides $5 billion to transition school buses from fossil fuel to electric. All four of Arkansas’s Republican congressmen and both Republican senators voted against the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that created the grant.
First Student received $8.6 million in funding from the EPA in a random lottery of applicants, while the Little Rock School District received a $9.8 million competitive grant from the same program after writing an application. With 50 electric school buses on the way, Little Rock will soon have the largest electric school bus operation in the South.
The largest and second-largest electric school bus fleets are in Oakland, California, and Montgomery County, Maryland, Matthews said. Montgomery County operates 86 electric buses, while Oakland has 74.
A January article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that over time, replacing diesel school buses with electric buses in cities will save more than $43,000 per bus in health-related costs by reducing asthma and other respiratory illnesses. The study estimates each new bus will provide more than $40,000 in climate benefits by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and global warming-related expenses like tornado damage or food supply chain disruptions.
“The Little Rock School District is responsible for transporting our students with special needs,” said Young. “And we have over 500 of those students that we transport from home to school and from school to home every day. And they are the children that will really benefit from this.”
Young noted that many special needs students in the district have asthma and other health problems.
“The students we are transporting have a variety of health issues. The clean air and the improved quietness of the ride, the peacefulness of it, most importantly, the improved air quality will help the students we are transporting,” Young said.
The initial cost of replacing a diesel bus with an electric bus is high, so the grants from the Environmental Protection Agency are particularly helpful, Matthews said. For First Student, the Clean Bus Program is allowing the company to transition to electric buses faster than anticipated.
“This program is allowing us to meet our goals. First Students has set a goal of electrifying 30,000 of our school buses by 2035,” Matthews said. “So this type of program from the US EPA is allowing us to meet our target.”
Another challenge, according to Matthews, will be building the charging infrastructure for the electric buses.
Young told the Arkansas Times that building the transformer will be the largest logistical hold- up, but she was confident that as Matthews said, the buses would be on the road transporting students by late 2025.
“If it’s a win for students, it’s a win for our community,” Young said.