At its February 1, 2023 Regular Board Meeting, the Savannah Chatham County Public School System (SCCPSS) approved an action that will bring 25 new electric school buses to the system at a cost of $9,375,000.00. According to agenda minutes on the SCCPSS website, 100% of the funding for the fleet will come from the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Clean School Bus Grant.
Peachstate Truck Centers will be providing the district with the 25 electric Thomas Built Buses.
“Thomas Built buses were chosen over the Blue Bird buses because of the available long term warrantied battery energy,” states a portion of the official meeting minutes.
Last year, the EPA received around 2,000 applications requesting nearly $4 billion in funding for the 2022 Clean School Bus (CSB) Rebates. The applicant pool had submissions from all 50 states, Washington D.C., Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam and American Samoa. In response to the program’s popularity and the rising demand for better, more efficient public school transportation across the country, the EPA nearly doubled its program funding from $500 million to $965 million.
The EPA estimates its CSB rebate program will fund approximately 2,500 new school buses this year.
At the SCCPSS board meeting earlier this month, the vote to approve the grant passed 8-1. Those voting for the grant’s approval were: Dionne Hoskins-Brown, Cornelia Hall, Shawn Kachmar, David Bringman, Tonia Howard-Hall, Denise Grabowski, Paul Smith and Roger Moss. The lone nay vote was cast by Michael Johnson.
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This article appears in Connect Savannah | February, 2023.