How a Phoenix district's electric school buses could protect kids and help them learn

When the wheels on a diesel school bus go round, the resulting exhaust disproportionately impacts the health of children and communities of color.

That's why west Phoenix's Isaac School District, located in a predominantly Latinx part of the metro area, decided to pursue federal funding for electric school buses to ferry children into cleaner future learning environments.

On May 9, during the American Lung Association's National Clean Air Month, representatives from the district and several environmental groups held an event outside the Isaac District Administration building in view of the busy intersection at McDowell Road and North 35th Avenue to celebrate the benefits of clean buses.

"We were very fortunate to receive this grant for six electric buses," Mario Ventura, superintendent of Isaac School District, said at the event. "I do not know one superintendent that did not apply. In fact, there was a little bit of jealousy going on amongst all of us, like 'Why did you get it and not us.' And we're gonna ask for more."

In October 2022, Isaac School District received $2.37 million from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Clean School Bus Program, which is funded with $5 billion from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, to be awarded between 2022 and 2026.

In the 2022 round, the agency reviewed 2,000 applications requesting nearly $4 billion for more than 12,000 buses, and funded 2,490 electric replacements nationwide at a cost of just under $1 billion.

Seven school districts in Arizona were among the 2022 awardees. The six electric school buses now reducing tailpipe emissions within the Isaac School District join 22 others in the state funded by the federal program, including seven in the Mohave Valley Elementary District and six in the Somerton Elementary District.

The Mesa Unified School District received $750,000 from the same program for 25 propane-fueled buses, which are considered cleaner-burning than diesel buses. EPA funding can also be used toward charging infrastructure for zero-emissions buses, but not for propane-fueling infrastructure.

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Separate initiatives to replace diesel school buses with electric versions on U.S. roads are also contributing to the effort to decarbonize the transportation sector, which is responsible for almost 40% of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions that are trapping additional heat in the atmosphere and raising average temperatures.

The World Resources Institute administers a program in partnership with the Bezos Earth Fund that aims to help get the country "on a path toward electrifying the entire fleet of U.S. school buses by 2030."

Cartwright School District and Phoenix Union High School District also currently operate electric buses as a result of their own organizing and fundraising efforts, according to Nuvia Enriquez, communications director for Chispa AZ.

In late April, the EPA started accepting applications for its 2023 round of electric school bus funding. Ventura plans to apply again.

"We will continue to advocate for these electric buses because we know how important it is for our community," Ventura said. "It is our responsibility to protect our students and staff from all types of health risks, including air pollutants. It is well documented that clean air promotes greater performance in teaching and learning. And it keeps our students healthy, so that they do not miss school, and they do not miss out on educational opportunities."

Asthma worsened by fossil fuels interferes with learning

Two stories told at the mic on May 9 outside the Isaac School District building speak to the importance of cleaning up air pollution for student performance.

Hazel Chandler, an organizer with the Arizona chapter of Moms Clean Air Force, a network of 1.5 million moms trying to improve air quality, recounted a situation she described as "the scariest thing that I've ever experienced," when, years ago, she saw a child suffer a near-fatal asthma attack while waiting for a school bus.

"One of the things that I really observed when working with these school districts was that when children were waiting for their buses, the buses were idling," Chandler said. "It's hot, and you cannot get on the bus without having the air conditioning running continuously. I frequently saw kids having to use their asthma inhalers in order to wait for their bus or on their bus."

A vast body of scientific research has found evidence for greater hazards to children of air pollution resulting from burning fossil fuels.

A review paper published last year in The New England Journal of Medicine detailed connections between fossil fuel pollution and increased risk that children would develop asthma, bronchitis, autistic traits, depression, anxiety, hypertension, immune system dysregulation and more.

"We showed that children exposed to high air pollution in the city lose IQ points," Frederica Perera, the lead author on that study, told The Arizona Republic. "Children’s ability to learn has been affected by climate change."

Another scientific study recently published in the journal Urban Studies and covered in the Los Angeles Times, resulting in much pushback from drivers, found that exposure to air pollution is highest for people who tend to drive less but live near highways.

Historic practices of building highways near lower-income neighborhoods and vice versa mean that more affluent commuters and travelers passing through often contribute to poor air quality in areas where they don't stick around to breathe it.

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The Isaac District administration building is next door to Isaac Middle School and the Boys and Girls Club of West Phoenix and just down the street from Isaac Preschool, Esperanza Elementary School and the Heart of Isaac Community Center.

All of these facilities are nestled in the nook of two major highways — just blocks from Interstate 10 and one mile west of Interstate 17. According to the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, which helped organize the event, 92% of students in the Isaac School District are Latinx.

"Pollution from heavy-duty vehicles harms everyone, but is especially hazardous to low-wealth communities and communities of color who live closest to major highways, freight hubs, and high-traffic areas," said Anabel Maldonado, director of political programs in Arizona for the Environmental Defense Fund. "This can have fatal consequences, as Latinx children are 40% more likely to die from asthma. That combines with the fact that low-income communities lack health insurance, making it a financial hardship."

Maldonado's own story from childhood was the other asthma mic drop at the May 9 event. She described growing up in metro Phoenix with asthma so severe that it forced her family to move to Mexico for a year to try to recover from the financial burden of resulting hospital bills.

"I know firsthand the devastating impacts that dangerous air pollution had on my health and my education," Maldonado told the crowd. "I grew up with severe asthma, and I was in and out of the hospital for most of kindergarten, first and second grade, missing critical phases of instruction. And now I know, working in the environmental space, that riding a dirty diesel school bus every day only exacerbated my asthma."

Injustice in the air, solutions in the works

While electrifying school buses six at a time is not likely to create immediately noticeable air quality improvements or solve the problem entirely, advocates say it's an important step toward reducing fossil fuel emissions and addressing inequalities in how different communities feel the effects of climate change.

As state Sen. Flavio Bravo, D-Phoenix, noted in a news release before expressing his support for the Isaac School District buses, "air pollution spews into our air from diesel buses, cars and trucks, and this exhaust knows no bounds, blowing every which direction."

But with 480,000 school buses currently on U.S. roads, according to a March 2022 report by the research and policy center Environment America, meeting the World Resources Institute's goal to electrify the whole fleet by 2030 could make a meaningful difference, especially in areas closer to heavy traffic. Every bus replacement matters.

As of that March 2022 report, fewer than 1% of school buses nationwide were powered by electricity. Getting to 100% would reduce domestic annual greenhouse gas emissions by an estimated 8 million metric tons, equal to that created by burning more than 785 million gallons of diesel fuel.

Read more: The latest from Joan Meiners at azcentral, a column on climate change that publishes weekly

Equipping that many school buses with rechargeable batteries could also benefit communities by allowing those buses to serve as power centers when not shuttling students. Bidirectional batteries on electric school buses, the EPA suggests, could be charged during off-peak hours and then used "as mini, mobile sources of power."

The agency estimates that, if half the U.S. fleet had these bidirectional, vehicle-to-grid batteries, school buses could store enough energy to charge laptops for nearly every high school student in the country for a month, for example.

The Environment America report posits that the mobile storage could be used to fill a range of power needs during high-demand times of day, helping to accelerate the transition to a renewable grid.

Electrifying the U.S. school bus fleet is expected to help move the needle toward climate mitigation success globally, while offering extra health, infrastructure and economic benefits to the specific communities where they are in operation.

The EPA program prioritizes applications that would serve areas with high-need local educational agencies, are located in rural or Bureau of Indian Affairs-funded school districts or receive basic support payments for children who reside on tribal land. All seven districts in Arizona that received EPA funding in 2022 met these priority criteria in some way.

"Clean school buses are our best and cheapest alternative, and they will let our kids breathe," Chandler said on May 9, standing next to one of Isaac School District's shiny, new electric buses, which took the organizers for a short test ride at the event's conclusion. She added in an email to The Republic later that "moms all over our country's Mother's Day wish is for their children to have a healthy, happy future."

Joan Meiners is the climate news and storytelling reporter at The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com. Before becoming a journalist, she completed a doctorate in ecology. Follow Joan on Twitter at @beecycles or email her at joan.meiners@arizonarepublic.com. Read more of her coverage at environment.azcentral.com.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Phoenix school district is helping kids learn using electric buses