The district’s electric school bus, originally scheduled to arrive in late spring through the federal Clean School Bus program, has been delayed until March 2025 due to a backlog of orders at the bus manufacturer, which could be too late for the terms of the grant’s fall deadline.
Schools Superintendent Bill Burr explained the reasons for the delay at a school board meeting on March 18.
The delay could pose a problem, as the grant deadline requires the bus to be on the job by October. Burr doesn’t know yet whether the grant can be salvaged. “We’re working on that,” he said after the meeting. “It’s a question for the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency).”
Wrangell was the only school district in Alaska to be awarded a $395,000 grant in October 2022 to purchase an electric school bus through the EPA program.
One factor in the delay was the unexpected influx of orders for electric buses from schools across the country also trying to take advantage of the federal grant, and how production time estimates changed significantly from when the Wrangell district first looked at it.
“When we had talked to them before December, and we were talking with a company that was hesitant, they were thinking two to three months to build, and two or three months to get it,” Burr said. “We were looking at a six-month window, which was plenty of time.”
But now the manufacturer has said the build and transport time will take much longer, leading to the arrival time being moved to March of next year. Each bus is built to order at IC Bus, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the vehicle would then have to be transported to Alaska.
“Our problem is it took a long time (to submit the order) because they (the buses) are not common in Alaska,” Burr said. “The specifications are all different. What plug-in would you like? What kind of (recharging) stand are you going to have? Do you want it in the front of the bus or the back of the bus? What kind of building are you going to put it in?”
“They just wanted to make sure that it was going to work with our temperatures, and how far we’re going, and the route,” he added. “Nobody in Alaska has done it.”
The unexpected delay and looming grant deadline are the latest in several obstacles the district has dealt with in trying to bring an electric school bus to Wrangell through the EPA clean-air program.
In April of last year, Taylor Transportation, the district’s bus service contractor, decided to pull the plug on using the grant to buy a bus, citing “unknowns” about electric vehicle operation and maintenance. The school district picked up the task to buy and own and be responsible for the bus, so as to preserve the grant.
The program also requires destruction of a diesel-powered bus to receive the funds for an electric bus. First Student, a nationwide company based out of Cincinnati, Ohio, which holds school bus service contracts around Alaska, donated a diesel bus last summer to the school district to be taken out of service without ever coming to Wrangell.
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