Pennsylvania school district upgrades buses and buildings thanks to infrastructure law

The bipartisan infrastructure law that was passed in 2021 by the Democratic-led Congress and implemented by the Biden-Harris administration included significant funding for public schools to upgrade their fleets to electric buses and make clean energy-infrastructure improvements to facilities.

Like many other school systems across Pennsylvania, the William Penn School District in southeastern Delaware County is receiving millions of dollars in grants through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

The law, which invested federal funds in America’s bridges, roads, ports, transit water systems, electric grid, and broadband infrastructure, was backed by Pennsylvania Democratic U.S. Sen. Bob Casey. His Republican opponent in this November’s election, Dave McCormick, has called for its repeal.

The law included funds to create the Clean School Bus program, providing rebates and direct grants to local school districts to replace their current school buses with new zero-emission electric buses. To date, the Environmental Protection Agency has announced initial grants to hundreds of school districts in all 50 states, enabling communities to purchase more than 8,000 electric school buses. 

William Penn will receive 25 of those electric buses. School districts in Harrisburg, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Scranton, Dauphin County, Fayette County, Lawrence County, Mifflin County, and other Pennsylvania communities have also been selected to receive funding for buses through the program. 

The law also appropriated money for the Renew America’s Schools program, which provides grants and other funding to dozens of school systems to make upgrades that will reduce energy consumption and cost while ensuring healthier indoor air quality. 

William Penn was awarded a $7.2 million grant in July 2023 to upgrade the Cypress Street campus of Penn Wood High School in Yeadon with an improved HVAC system, LED lights, and automated cooling and heating. In August 2024, the Pittsburgh Public Schools and Wilkinsburg School District were awarded $15.3 million in Renew America’s Schools funding.

Darnell Deans is chief of operations of the William Penn School District, which serves about 5,000 students. In a phone interview, Deans told the Pennsylvania Independent that the grants have been a major factor in the district’s efforts to get to net-zero emissions: “I think the infrastructure law is playing a large part in us, as a district, deciding that we want to pursue opportunities to move to a more sustainable source of energy and reinvest those savings back into the classroom.”

Deans said that the renovations are in the design phase and that they hope to break ground in March 2025 and complete the project by the summer of 2027. Their goal is to have the electric buses arrive by March 2026 and be in use by the 2026-2027 school year. 

“Our community is very excited that we are trying to find some ways of not only prioritizing 21st century learning for our students, but also ensuring that environmental hazards that are there, that we are all very much aware of, are being addressed through multiple means of sustainability,” Deans said. “We will use this as an opportunity to educate students on the decisions that we made and why we made the decisions and what our expected outcomes are for those decisions, to which teachers will also use it as an opportunity to implement different programming and projects into their curriculums.”

In a joint June 2023 press release with Democratic Sen. John Fetterman and Rep. Marcia Gay Scanlon announcing the Renew America’s Schools grant, Sen. Casey said: “Thanks to the infrastructure law, the William Penn School District can make much-needed upgrades to aging school facilities that students, faculty, and staff will benefit from for years to come. This $7.2 million grant is an investment in our students’ health and our clean energy future in Delaware County.”

“The No. 1 thing you do with a Senate majority and a House majority and a Republican president in the White House is you roll back all those incredible, expensive Biden bills — the infrastructure bill, the Build Back Better — all of that stuff, that’s the money that’s driving this huge uptick in inflation,” the multimillionaire former hedge fund executive McCormick told a radio host in November 2023, the HuffPost reported in January.