Don’t take my word for it. I’m a numbers guy, I’m a data guy. I put the data out there and let
everybody look at it. -Craig Beaver, Beaverton School District
Craig Beaver and Joel Feldhan, an operations supervisor, review routes prior to the start of the 2024-2025 school year. The district’s bell times changed this year, which complicated operations.
“The internet is my best friend,” he continued. “I don’t
have any technical degree or anything like that. I like talking to the electrical engineers and systems engineers and getting an understanding of how the electrons work and how the infrastructure works. It’s always a learn- ing experience. And even at STN [EXPO West in July], I learned a little bit more. I’m learning a lot more about batteries and even talking to the manufacturers on the difference between lithium-ion [nickle manganese co- balt] or lithium-iron phosphate.” In two days on site for this article, his desk was ob-
served full of printed articles, new ones each day. Not to mention the constant article references he would make throughout his interview. After doing research on electric school buses and realizing the available grants, he figured it wouldn’t cost him more than a diesel school bus to try out an EV. “I’m playing with the house’s mon- ey, so to speak,” he said, adding that he rolled the dice. “Believe me, it would have been easy to turn back the first year and a half.” The impetus for going electric was bringing the clean- est possible environment to students, especially those with special needs. The second reason, he said, was due to Beaverton’s size. “We felt like we could be a testbed for the Pacific Northwest and for Oregon,” he shared, adding that Salem-Keizer School District and Portland Public Schools are the other two large districts in the state.
“Everybody else is a lot smaller. A lot of them are run by contractors because they’re really small, but there’s some districts out there that are running 10 or 12 buses.” He said he felt Beaverton had the ability to outfit its fleet with electric school buses, a luxury that smaller districts don’t have. For instance, if a district is running 10 buses, one being electric, and it fails, the district is going to be in a tougher situation than if an electric bus (or 10) fails in Beaverton. “There’s advantages to being big, you’re able to do things, one-offs and two-offs that you can’t do on a smaller scale because it’s just too much of a percentage of your fleet,” he said. “You can look to us and see how we did it, see if it works for you. And that was one of the reasons why we spread it out amongst all the manufacturers.” In early 2022, Beaverton bought first-generation Type D school buses from Blue Bird. “Everyone was learning at once,” he shared. “We worked through it. It was a great learning experience.” After figuring out the intricacies, the district bought the second-generation Blue Bird electric, and Beaver reports his department hasn’t had an ounce of trou- ble. Now, Beaverton currently has 25 electric school buses between Blue Bird and IC Bus along with one GreenPower. By April, the district will receive four more GreenPower Beasts, 10 more Blue Bird Type C special needs-equipped buses, 15 more IC buses, 17 RIDE Type
Find Beaver’s published data on alternative fuel/energy at the Beaverton School District website. The data is updated monthly. Visit
stnonline.com/go/j8.
34 School Transportation News • NOVEMBER 2024
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