State program helps rural school districts replace aging buses

Air quality and safety standards for school buses have improved dramatically in the past decade, but that doesn’t mean every kid is riding in a cleaner, safer bus.

Those big, yellow vehicles responsible for carrying children to and from school cost about $150,000 at a minimum to replace. For small, rural school districts especially, that can be prohibitively expensive.

Such is the case at Lakeport Unified School District, which recently sidelined one of the nine buses in its fleet and can’t afford to buy a new one.

The 1987 bus is a “high polluter,” said Dave Norris, director the district’s maintenance, operations and transportation department. For that reason, air quality regulations prohibit the district from driving the bus more than 1,000 miles a year. The result? “That bus is rendered useless,” Norris said.

Until 2013, he and transportation officials at other small, rural school districts relied on a state grant to pay for new buses. But the grant disappeared when California rolled out a new school funding system, forcing already cash-strapped districts to choose between paying for buses and funding other education-related expenses, like teachers and textbooks.

That’s why he’s celebrating a new, $5 million bus replacement program approved in late June. The program, to be run by the California Air Resources Board program, will provide the first dedicated funding source in years for rural districts like his and others around Sonoma, Mendocino and Lake counties.

“We relied heavily on that school bus grant, always have,” Norris said. “Small school districts simply don’t have the funds it takes to replace school buses to the tune of $170,000. If we didn’t have school bus grant funding, we’d be running around on old buses and things would just get worse and worse.”

State Sen. Mike McGuire, D-Healdsburg, who led efforts to secure the funding, also celebrated the decision. He said, “This funding is going to put fuel-efficient buses on the road which will be cleaner burning, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and improve health outcomes for California schoolkids.”

Mike Rea is executive director of the West County Transportation Agency, which provides busing for 16 school districts from the outskirts of Santa Rosa to Cazadero. He helped push for the new program even though his agency has little need for it. That’s because they’ve been able to replace their aging fleet through another grant program meant for schools within the Bay Area Air Quality Management District. But Rea knows through his position as chapter president of the California Association of School Transportation Officials that many other school districts in northern Sonoma County as well as Mendocino and Lake counties have struggled to pay for new buses in recent years.

“There are a large number of districts within Marin, Lake, Mendocino and Sonoma counties that really need this program,” he said.

Such is the case at Cloverdale School District, where only two of the district’s five buses are in good working condition. Two can’t be driven because they don’t meet current emissions requirements; the other needs about $30,000 in repairs, Superintendent Jeremy Decker said.

“It makes it difficult if we have a field trip because if one breaks down, we have no backup,” Decker said. “We have looked at potentially having to purchase a bus but we’re holding off on doing it because it’s a hefty investment.”

Decker and Norris said paying for new school buses is just one of the many challenges their districts face in rebuilding transportation services, which were cut dramatically during the recession, for their students.

Both said providing transportation was an important service for their largely working-class communities.

“When you have working families, they’re not always available to drop students off,” Decker said. “In a community like ours, with lot of blue-collar people, when people can’t afford to pick up their kid, the child ends up walking home 2 to 3 miles.”

But it’s not just about providing more consistent transportation. It’s also about health and safety, officials said.

“In the last 10 years there have been tremendous advances in making buses cleaner and safer,” said Norris, who felt so strongly about the need for bus replacement funding that he testified in favor of it in Sacramento.

Rea said the transportation officials organization he works with surveyed school districts around the state and found that about 3,500 buses still in operation were made before 1994.

“The typical school bus in California is kept a long,long time,” he said. “If it weren’t for grant programs, there’d be no funding for replacement.”

At the same time, he said, federal standards for fuel emissions have gotten a lot stricter since 2007. Further outdating old buses, about a decade ago California began requiring new school buses to be equipped with seat belts.

McGuire pointed to Environmental Protection Agency statistics that show buses more than a decade old emit nearly twice as much pollution per mile as a semi truck. Buses made before 1990 can send as much as six times more particulate matter and nitrogen oxides, according to the EPA. Newer buses must comply with stricter emission standards, but more than half the buses on the road were made prior to when those emissions standards took effect.

The diesel exhaust is particularly harmful to children because their lungs are not fully developed, according to the EPA.

McGuire said it was particularly important to modernize rural school buses because rural districts transport a larger percent of their students compared to urban districts. In urban districts, more kids can walk or be driven by parents. At the same time, the cost of a bus represents a much larger share of the often-small districts’ overall budget.

“We know that students from rural areas are disproportionately impacted by exhaust because they have longer commutes and limited alternatives for getting to school,” McGuire said.

To address these issues, McGuire introduced a bill earlier this year that would fund $5 million worth of rural school bus replacements. But, he said, it became clear a legislative fix wouldn’t be necessary when the state’s Air Resources Board expressed interest in paying for the replacements as part of a larger program designed to improve air quality buy replacing all manner of outdated vehicles.

Now that the funding has been approved, a panel is being created to determine the criteria districts will meet to qualify for the grant, including the age of the school bus to be replaced and the size of the school district.

For now, the funding is allocated just for the 2015-16 fiscal year. But Rea said members of the Air Resources Board indicated that they wanted to continue the program into the future.

Bob Raines, superintendent/principal of the roughly 120-student Alexander Valley Union School District, said his students potentially could benefit from the grant as well.

The district’s single school bus is from 1997. When it requires unexpected maintenance, Raines must seek a loaner school bus from another school district.

“We’d like a new one that is more fuel-efficient and isn’t a polluter,” he said.

Staff Writer Jamie Hansen blogs about education at extracredit.blogs.pressdemocrat.com. You can reach her at 521-5205 or jamie.hansen@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter ?@jamiehansen.