Patriot Brief
Parents in western New York say children are freezing on electric school buses.
Drivers reportedly limit heat to preserve battery life and avoid breakdowns.
Cold-weather performance issues are exposing flaws in electric bus mandates.
There’s a special kind of madness required to look at a New York winter and decide the problem to experiment on is school transportation. Parents in Erie County are now being told — implicitly and sometimes explicitly — that their kids are cold because the bus needs to conserve battery power. Heat, apparently, is optional. Keeping the bus running takes priority over keeping children warm.
If anyone had tried this where I grew up in Michigan, in January, it would not have ended quietly. You wouldn’t have had polite interviews on the local news or parents sending their kids with hand warmers as a workaround. The parents would have been at the bus garage before sunrise, and the drivers and administrators responsible would have been run out of town on a rail — figuratively, but with plenty of volume and very little patience. Letting kids freeze wasn’t a “policy issue.” It was a line you didn’t cross.
What makes this situation worse is how predictable it all is. Batteries hate cold. Everyone knows this. Phones die faster. Cars struggle. Yet somehow policymakers convinced themselves that electric buses — carrying children, on tight schedules, in freezing conditions — would be immune to basic physics. So now drivers are stuck making absurd choices: turn on the heat and risk not finishing the route, or turn it down and hope the kids tough it out.
And when the buses fail entirely, it gets even uglier. Kids standing outside in the cold for 30 minutes while a replacement bus crawls its way over isn’t a hiccup. It’s a safety issue. One that was entirely foreseeable.
This isn’t about being anti-technology. It’s about being anti-stupid. Mandates written in conference rooms don’t change weather, terrain, or reality. When ideology overrides common sense, the consequences always land on the people with the least power — in this case, kids just trying to get to school without freezing.
If electric buses can’t reliably provide heat in winter, they don’t belong everywhere. Pretending otherwise doesn’t make it brave or progressive. It makes it negligent.
From Western Journal:
Parents in Erie County, New York, are complaining as their children freeze on electric school buses while drivers try to conserve battery life.
WIVB reported on Dec. 18 that several families in the Lake Shore Central School District are raising concerns as their children come home saying their buses were cold.
Some parents are even forced to send their children to school with hand warmers.
“The heaters on the bus run off the same electricity as the bus itself,” Scott Ziobro, a parent and former school board candidate, told WIVB.
“They were told that it drains the battery capacity of the bus itself.”
New York state has mandated that all new school buses purchased must be electric by 2027.
Lake Shore Central School District therefore has 23 electric school buses, alongside 24 gasoline buses and four diesel buses.
The school system bought 20 of the electric buses with the help of a $7.9 million grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Despite the new technology, some parents reported buses breaking down with their children inside, meaning they had to stand outside in the cold while another bus arrived.
“The bus broke down on route,” Chris Lampman, whose son allegedly had to stand in the cold, told WIVB.
“They deployed a substitute bus, and the bus was more than 30 minutes late. My son stood outside for over 35 minutes waiting for a bus that wasn’t coming,” he added.
“Some of those kids are on there for upwards of a half hour or more while the bus makes its route. There’s no reason that the kids should freeze for all that time.”
These are not the first reports of faulty electric school buses.
Maine Department of Education Commissioner Pender Makin wrote a letter to the EPA asking for waived penalties for not using buses provided by manufacturer Lion Electric, according to a report earlier this year from WGME-TV.
“Specifically, we urge the agency to pursue legal remedies, including claw-backs of federal funding or other resources provided to the company,” he wrote.
At least six districts in the state were reporting problems with Lion Electric buses acquired through federal programs.
As of fall 2024, the EPA spent $1 billion to put a mere 5,000 electric buses on the roads.
Photo Credit: (Spencer Platt / Getty Images)
