By admin 
As students across California head back to school, it’s a good time to highlight an all-too-common contributor to asthma attacks in children: exhaust pollution from diesel-powered school buses.
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Thankfully, there’s a solution that’s ready and available for school districts. Electric school buses provide a zero-emission ride to and from school for kids, which means zero time spent inhaling toxic fumes from their own bus.
Unlike many other threats to children’s health, diesel exhaust is a problem that has an immediately available solution. So why aren’t more school districts taking action?
Unfortunately, even though lifetime operational costs can be cheaper, the up-front purchase price of an electric school bus remains higher than one that burns diesel. While experts expect that electric school bus prices will decline over time, government funding is still often a key piece of the puzzle for school districts that have been able to start transitioning their fleets.
School districts with higher resources should not be the only ones that can give their students safe rides. In 2022, California created the Zero-Emission School Bus and Infrastructure Incentive Project, a $1.5 billion commitment toward zero-emission school buses and supporting infrastructure spread over three years, to help realize this transition. The program was designed to prioritize disadvantaged and low-income communities that face the greatest barriers to electrification.
But the program has been unfunded since its first round in late 2024. Demand for the initial round exceeded the available $500 million available by nearly half again as much, leaving 33 school districts and nearly 500 electric school buses on a waitlist.
Districts are ready to make the switch, but many lack the necessary resources. And, considering the state’s requirement for all school buses to be zero-emission by 2035, it’s clear that more sustained statewide support and resources are needed to help districts get there.
As a pediatrician, I’m acutely aware of the danger that diesel exhaust pollution presents for children. It can be easy to lose sight of the harmful effects of pollution when discussed in the abstract, but this instance is incredibly tangible: 90% of U.S. school buses run on diesel, meaning the vast majority of school children who take the bus may sit in dangerous diesel exhaust twice a day, five times a week, throughout the school year.
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Air pollution enters a child’s body in two ways, either through their lungs or their nose, along their olfactory nerve and straight into their brains. Both cause harm. Children and their still-developing lungs breathe faster than adults, which means more opportunities to inhale diesel fumes — a risk factor for asthma, cancer and other respiratory illnesses.
Air pollution a child’s cognitive abilities even with short term exposures. Studies show poorer academic performance, observable in test scores. Longer and consistent exposures to air pollution have been linked with structural changes in children’s brains.
And the threat is not felt equally: Black students, children with disabilities and low-income students rely on diesel-burning school buses more than others, and thus are more likely to suffer from asthma than other children, along with Native American children and children from some Asian American communities.
Electric school buses are already on the road in communities across the country, safely and reliably transporting hundreds of thousands of students in all types of climates and in urban, suburban and rural communities. Each additional day that schools aren’t given the support they need to modernize their bus fleets is one more day that California’s young children are subject to the threat of diesel exhaust.
This school year, our state leaders must finally address the threat of diesel school bus pollution once and for all.
Dr. Lisa Patel is a Bay Area pediatrician and executive director of the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health.
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