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Kamala Harris Visits Falls Church To Kick Off Clean School Bus Program

Washington, May 20, 2022
Originally published on Patch.

Vice President Kamala Harris and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan visited Meridian High School in Falls Church on Friday to kick off the Biden administration’s new national initiative to make school bus fleets less polluting.

Over the next five years, the $5 billion Clean School Bus Program will help school districts replace diesel-powered buses with electric ones.

On Friday, Harris and Regan announced that an initial $500 million is now available for school districts to begin replacing the nation’s fleet of school buses with zero-emission buses. The $500 million represents the first round of funding out of the $5 billion funding for low and zero-emission school buses over the next five years.

"Yellow school buses are our nation's largest form of mass transit," Harris said in her remarks at Meridian High School. "Everyday in our country, more than 25 million children ride to and from school on our nation's fleet of school buses. And 95 percent of our nearly 500,000 school buses run on diesel fuel."

Breathing diesel fumes can cause headaches and nausea, aggravate asthma, and elevate the risk of cancer, Harris said. Students who take a half-hour ride to and from school from the first day of kindergarten to the last day of high school will experience the equivalent of 90 full days of exposure to diesel exhaust, she said.

Diesel exhaust from these school buses is also a greenhouse gas, adding millions of tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere each year, she said.

Electric buses are a solution to the pollution — "no exhaust, no diesel smell," Harris said.

"Today, we are announcing $500 million in clean bus funding to go to schools across the country," she said. "Starting today, every school district in our nation can apply for funding to purchase clean buses and to build the charging infrastructure that we need to build across our country."

The bus that the vice president toured was from the Dominion Energy Electric School Bus program. Dominion has deployed 50 electric school buses across 15 schools districts in Virginia as part of the program.

The White House press corps was taken on a brief ride in the electric school bus before Harris spoke at Meridian High School. The bus driver who drove the press corps on Friday and his wife both drive electric school buses for Fairfax County Public Schools.

The federal Clean School Bus Program was established and funded by the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

On Friday, the U.S. EPA began accepting the first round of applications from school districts and other school bus operators for rebates to replace existing school buses with clean and zero-emission models. Applications must be submitted by Aug. 19 for this first round of rebates.

The EPA will launch a separate grant competition later this year. Additional Clean School Bus grant competitions will be run every year over the next five years.

School districts across Virginia have received funding to purchase electric school buses from other sources, too. Last August, former Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam announced that Falls Church City Public Schools would receive $530,000 in funding to replace diesel school buses with two new electric buses.

The grant funding came from $10.5 million the Volkswagen Environmental Mitigation Trust provided the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality to replace a total of 83 school buses across the state with electric or propane-fueled buses.

In a separate funding measure, President Joe Biden signed a spending bill in March that included $5.4 million for 10 projects in Northern Virginia requested by Rep. Don Beyer (D-8th) as part of the fiscal year 2022 Community Project Funding Program.

Among the 10 projects was an electric school bus and associated electric vehicle charging infrastructure project for the City of Falls Church that totaled $396,227.

“We are thrilled to host this event as it is a wonderful opportunity to showcase our EV plans, Sustainability Efforts, and our beautiful new LEED Gold certified state-of-the-art campus,” Falls Church City Public Schools said in a statement Friday.