The White House has announced the first round of funding for electric school buses as part of the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. $500 million will be available to help school districts purchase vehicles and install infrastructure. 

As of September 2021, there were 1,738 electric school buses awarded, ordered, delivered and deployed in the United States, according to CALSTART’s January 2022 report, Zeroing in on ESBs. However, there are approximately 500,000 school buses transporting 26 million students every day in the United States. The vast majority of those school buses run on diesel, producing exhaust that contains fine particles of carbon and toxic gases, including benzene, CALSTART says.