Students welcomed the arrival of an electric school bus for Silver Rail Elemetary School in the Bend-LaPine School District in Oregon.


Crabtree said. “You have to have the ability to have some flexibility in your fleet, to maybe not have it run- ning right away as you work through concerns that are different than regular diesel or propane buses. If you have a very small fleet, like five buses and you’re re- placing one with electric, that would make me nervous. I have a big enough fleet that I have backup until we work out the bugs.” Oregon requires school buses to have air brakes, so the


district worked with manufacturer Lion Electric to get an electric bus with air brakes—not a usual offering. There was a “little glitch with some module,” but Crabtree said


44 School Transportation News • APRIL 2023


it was resolved and the district is ready to see how the bus does and look to the future. “Investigate before you make a move,” Crabtree ad- vised. “It is a big change.”


Dream Big, Start Slow Often when a district acquires its first electric vehicles, “the implementation starts once the vehicle shows up. Then it starts to impact the facilities folks, the overnight servicing team, the operations folks, the data reporting person,” commented Erik Bigelow, CTE senior proj- ect manager and director of Midwest operations, on the


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