It Takes a Village to Procure an Electric School Bus

A small charter school in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the Arts Based School, replaced its 20-year-old diesel school bus with an electric one, funded largely through the EPA's Clean School Bus Program. School leaders first explored the idea during a 2022 board retreat, then worked with the Piedmont Environmental Alliance and other partners to pull together an application, combining federal grant money with tax credits and utility rebates so the school didn't have to cover the full cost itself.

The process wasn't quick. After winning the grant, the school bought the bus expecting reimbursement, but that federal payment was delayed almost a year, partly due to a change in federal administration. That meant the school had to cover the bus cost out of pocket in the meantime. Leaders there say any district pursuing this kind of grant should plan for a real gap between spending the money and getting reimbursed, and should have someone dedicated to managing the paperwork, deadlines, and communication with partners.

Being part of the federal bus program also helped the school land additional clean-energy funding: it later added a 20 kilowatt solar array on one of its buildings through North Carolina's GreenPower Solar+Schools program, which nearly offsets the cost of charging the electric bus. For homeowners, this isn't a program you can apply for directly, but it's a reminder that federal and state clean-energy incentives can often be combined, or "stacked," to make a bigger project affordable, and that reimbursement-based grants can take much longer to pay out than expected.