Sometimes it’s below freezing. Sometimes it’s above 100. One August day, the air conditioning wasn’t working.
Arias is a bus driver for Julian Union High School District. The district serves not many more than 100 students at its one high school — but it also covers over 900 square miles, and it has just two buses to cover them.
Those buses need to be reliable, and they need to last.
Those unique concerns have given San Diego County’s smaller rural schools a far different outlook from larger, more urban and suburban districts on a 2023 law that aims to make all California school buses electric in the coming years.
Bigger districts have embraced the mandate, and in some cases gone well beyond it to curb their emissions.
California wants school districts to move away from diesel buses to electric school buses, citing children’s health and environmental impact. Rural school districts, including those in San Diego County, say that they’re not the right fit for their schools.
School buses drive twice a day over the long winding roads from children’s homes to their schools. The lengths of the drive can push the limits of what electric buses can do.
Local rural school leaders have shared their concerns about the push for electrification of schools, while local urban and suburban school leaders have touted the benefits and excitement around electrification.
Legislation enacted in 2023, Assembly Bill 597, requires new school buses bought or contracted by California local education agencies to be zero-emission, where feasible, starting in 2035.
The law also lets districts ask for a five-year extension if it’s not feasible due to both terrain and route constraints. And starting in 2040, some small or rural districts that can prove they’re not feasible — districts with either fewer than 600 students or fewer than 10 residents per square mile — can apply for annual extensions through 2045.
Diesel school bus emissions are harmful to human health, especially for children whose lungs are still developing, environmental regulators say. Proponents of electric school buses point to their health and environmental benefits, as well as long-term cost savings for districts.
But the upfront costs can be prohibitive for districts. Whereas full-size diesel buses cost around $200,000, full-size electric buses can cost about twice that, the state Legislative Analyst’s Office found in a 2022-23 budget report.
That same report also said that recent electric school bus models can be driven between 120 and 150 miles on a single charge — assuming favorable conditions. But mountainous terrain can reduce range. So can intense heat and air conditioning systems.
But Serena Pelka, a policy advocate with the Climate Action Campaign, which has worked on electrification resolutions with districts, wrote in an email that battery technology and infrastructure has been rapidly improving to better serve rural districts.
“When we start working with a new district, we never use a ‘one size fits all’ approach, including at rural districts. As you know, each district is unique with specific opportunities, needs and challenges,” she wrote. “Our goal is always to work together to tailor the resolution to bring the greatest community benefits to that district and neighborhoods, including what students want.”
One of those districts, Vista Unified, which serves over 18,000 students, has gone beyond buses and is now designing an almost entirely electric school, Bobier Elementary. It will be 90 percent off the grid.
“Everything on the campus is no natural gas at all, or any petroleum products on the campus as it’s designed,” said Shawn Loescher, the district’s assistant superintendent of business and operations support services.
They’re also looking at new energy standards for kitchen equipment, heat and air conditioning, he said. And the campus is a smart campus: Lights turn on and off automatically, and heat patterns and air shift around the building efficiently. Solar trees are planned, too.
There’s excitement around the work the district is doing. The board recently passed a resolution to electrify the district overall, including a plan to phase out fossil fuel infrastructure by 2035.
And the district is investing in electric lawn maintenance equipment — which is far quieter than its traditional diesel counterparts. Teachers will no longer have to pause their lectures as weed-whips and lawnmowers go by their window.
For trucks on campus, one benefit is having instantaneous torque and horsepower, so the towing capacity does meet all of their needs. The district is also working to right-size its fleet, so students can be in an appropriately sized SUV or bus.
“You don’t put two students in an EV that seats 60,” Loescher said.
This work has also been cheaper for them than replacing their fleet with gas vehicles. And Vista Unified has reduced its petroleum usage by 60 percent since 2003.
“We actually are spending significantly less on any petroleum products this year than we did in 2003, and we’ve got substantially more bus routes on top of it,” he said.
The district has converted most of its yellow fleet and currently is converting its white fleet, which he said will pick up a lot of the petroleum usage. But electrification does take a long time, said Loescher — the district doesn’t control the grid, nor situations like public safety power shutoffs, which is a key element the district is making plans for.
“For other things, like water conservation, there’s measures we can put in place right now,” he said.
San Diego Unified, the largest local district and second-largest district in the state, has also been touting the expansion of its electric fleet as the school year begins. It has also been expanding electrification efforts to other vehicles, like lawnmowers.
As of this summer, the district had 13 electric buses. It has been awarded an EPA grant for 30 more and is working toward a state grant for additional buses.
“Having the 13 come from the initial grant, it allowed us to have enough that we could learn on a broad scale — but not so much that we had to disrupt our overall operations,” Gene Robinson, the district’s director of transportation and distribution services, said at a July news conference.
But some of the county’s more rural districts have expressed trepidation around the transition. Yvonne Fleet, the Julian Union High School District superintendent, worries about the conditions buses will face.
The state has created two programs to help school districts access electric school buses — a grant program, and a one-for-one trade-in program that lets districts trade in a functional diesel bus for an electric one.
But Julian says it didn’t have anyone on its 22-person staff to spare to write a grant proposal, and it wasn’t willing to give up one of its only two diesel buses. “You’re waiting up to a year for your electric bus, and then find out that it may not work on the terrain,” said Melissa Krogh, account tech and executive secretary in the district.
Patrick Keeley, superintendent of the sprawling Mountain Empire Unified School District, has similar misgivings.
His district — which faces serious financial problems and facilities challenges already — hasn’t bought any electric buses yet. It had already entered a contract for new diesel buses soon before the mandate was created.
True to its name, Mountain Empire spans over 600 miles of mountainous terrain, and Keeley worries kids could be stranded on a mountain road. “Do these buses have the capacity to make it on the roads out here consistently?”
Keeley said he has shared those concerns with other mountainous districts around the state. “There were some horror stories attached to it around buses breaking down, running out of charge and things like that,” he added.
That’s been true for some districts elsewhere.
Fall River Joint Unified District in Northern California has 16 school buses, six of them electric — but some of its routes, such as for sports teams’ away games, are too long for a single charge, said Superintendent Morgan Nugent.
“For us, it’s just been nothing but headache and additional expenses to the district,” he said.
Nugent says he previously worked in another rural district that had to drive generators out to meet its electric buses. In Fall River, the district can now use the electric buses for its shorter routes, with charging stations in garages. But since diesel buses will eventually no longer be available, it’s buying them now to get through the coming decades.
“Trying to force everything as quickly as they have tried doesn’t make sense,” he said.
Keeley is more optimistic. He knows phasing out diesel buses for electric is the direction that the state is going in — but he thinks that by the time his district adopts it, the technology will surely have improved.
“Ultimately, it’s a great goal,” he said. “Not all places are the same, and so a one-size-fits-all policy … doesn’t necessarily work in local context.”
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