On a recent weekday, a handful of elementary school kids dashed through cold rain toward idling buses as school let out in the Ralls County School District in Northeast Missouri.

About 800 students attend school in this rural district. It has a fleet of 17 buses that all look like your standard yellow school bus, but two of them are powered by batteries.

This school district is one of the first in Missouri to get electric buses, funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that passed in 2021.

Ninth grader Ian Joiner, whose dad is one of the drivers, is on board. He’s noticed this bus is different.

“It’s not as loud as the other ones but it’s definitely fun to ride this bus,” Joiner said.

Ian takes his seat as the dispatch gives drivers the all clear to start drop-off.

In communities all across the country, students like Ian are also traveling to school on electric school buses. After a long ramp-up, the Environmental Protection Agency is sending nearly 5,000 electric buses to schools.

The EPA program has funded $1.8 billion of clean buses so far. In the next five years that number’s going to go up to $5 billion. Since the federal government is footing the bill for these new buses, adopting them and getting them on the roads was a no-brainer for many school districts.

But without that money, many school district officials say they wouldn’t have purchased these vehicles, mostly because they’re super expensive. A new electric school bus can cost about $350,000. That’s more than triple the cost of a new diesel bus. Plus districts have to install expensive charging infrastructure. Schools will save on cost per mile and bus maintenance over time, but still that doesn’t make up for that high price tag.

“The bipartisan infrastructure law was really a game changer,” said Sue Gander, director of the Electric School Bus Initiative at the World Resources Institute.

Bus manufacturers are still in the early days of this technology, Gander said. As the industry scales, she expects bus prices to come down.

“A lot of that is driven by the prices of batteries, and we know that the prices of batteries are coming down,” Gander said.

In Missouri, Ralls County School District transportation supervisor Eric Joiner drives one of the electric buses through a typical route, on gravel roads between expansive farm fields. He kinda nerds out over these buses.

“I think it’s fun,” Joiner said. “I like driving a school bus better than my own personal vehicle.”

There are other upsides. Zero emissions means fewer greenhouse gasses and also better air quality for school kids.

Still, Joiner gets what some call “range anxiety” on his long, rural routes. One time his battery got down to eight percent.

“So when you start getting that low, you start to kind of panic a little bit, especially when you’ve got kids on board,” Joiner said.

One state over in Iowa, the Coon Rapids-Bayard School District just got a new electric school bus last month.

“I like the fact that it’s quiet,” said superintendent Eric Trager. “I mean, it does the job that it’s supposed to do.”

At first, Trager said some members of his school board weren’t sure about the electric buses.

“But you know, beyond the politics of it, and the personal opinions, it’s a free bus, right?”

Free bus — Trager said it’s as simple as that.