About 55 percent of public school students in the United States take the bus to school, and 95 percent of those buses have diesel engines.
Based on analyses of the pollutant levels produced by of those engines, the pollutants on school buses are 5 to 10 times higher than nearby areas.
There’s further evidence that reducing these pollutant levels would have significant, positive public health outcomes for children riding these buses every day.
There’s even evidence that retrofitting diesel buses to pollute less is linked to increasing test scores.
Another way to put it is this:
Teachers could find ways to work smarter and harder on behalf of students, or we could just stop poisoning them on the way to school.
We really suck.
