Work Description

Title: Dataset and Associated Code to Assess the Attendance Benefits of the US EPA School Bus Rebate Program Open Access Deposited

h
Attribute Value
Methodology
  • We obtained data on all applicants for the 2012 through 2017 lotteries from the US EPA under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. The data for all applicants included: the lottery selection status, school district served, number of buses requested to be replaced, and funding requested. For districts that were awarded funding, we additionally received information on the number of buses/engines replaced or retrofitted, as well as engine model year of the replaced (i.e., baseline) buses, although this information was most often averaged across all replaced buses in a district. School district information came from the US Department of Education’s (ED) yearly Local Education Agency (School District) Universe Survey Data. These publicly available data include the number of students (total and by grade and race/ethnicity), number of schools, and urbanicity (i.e., city, suburb, town, rural) of each district. The land area of each school district was provided in the National Center for Education Statistics School District Geographic Relationship files for the school years of 2013-2014, 2015-2016, and 2017-2018. As a proxy for district socioeconomic status, we used data on the number of students in a school who were eligible for the free or reduced-price lunch program during the baseline school year from the US ED yearly Public Elementary/Secondary School Universe Survey Data, which we aggregated to the district level. We collected 2012-2013 through 2018-2019 school year annual attendance rates for school districts that applied for funding from each state’s Department of Education, either from public websites or through individual data requests with a state. Annual attendance rates reflect the average number of students present at all schools in a district across all days of a school year divided by the number of students serviced by that district. We linked annual attendance rate data for both the school year before and after the purchase of new buses to EPA entrants to have the most proximate data to an entrant’s lottery selection status inform the analysis and to reduce the influence of trends.
Description
  • In this study, we took advantage of the randomized allocation of the US EPA's funding for school bus replacements and retrofits to causally assess the impacts of upgrading buses on student attendance through the EPA’s national School Bus Rebate Program. Specifically, we used classical intent-to-treat analyses for randomized controlled trials to compare the change in school district level attendance rates after vs before the 2012 through 2017 lotteries by funding selection status . We used overall district attendance rates since rates were not available for only school-bus riders.
Creator
Depositor
  • mpedde@umich.edu
Contact information
Discipline
Funding agency
  • Other Funding Agency
Other Funding agency
  • Health Effects Institute
ORSP grant number
  • AWD014294
Keyword
Citations to related material
Resource type
Last modified
  • 06/22/2023
Published
  • 06/22/2023
Language
DOI
  • https://doi.org/10.7302/tvhc-hq48
License
To Cite this Work:
Pedde, M. (2023). Dataset and Associated Code to Assess the Attendance Benefits of the US EPA School Bus Rebate Program [Data set], University of Michigan - Deep Blue Data. https://doi.org/10.7302/tvhc-hq48

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Files (Count: 4; Size: 929 KB)

Thumbnailthumbnail-column Title Original Upload Last Modified File Size Access Actions
read_me_for_Attendance_Benefits_...s.txt 2023-04-06 2023-06-22 3.4 KB Open Access
Bus_Funding_Attendance_Results_a...n.sas 2023-06-14 2023-06-14 11.5 KB Open Access
DERA_Lottery_All_final_Data_Dict...y.csv 2023-06-16 2023-06-16 5.68 KB Open Access
DERA_Lottery_All_final.csv 2023-06-16 2023-06-16 908 KB Open Access

Date: 6 April, 2023

Dataset Title: Dataset to Assess the Attendance Benefits of the US EPA School Bus Rebate Program

Dataset Creators: M. Pedde, A. Szpiro, R. Hirth, S.D. Adar

Dataset Contact: Meredith Pedde mpedde@umich.edu

Funding: 966-RFA18-1/19 (Health Effects Institute)

Key Points:
- Older school buses can expose students to high levels of diesel exhaust.
- This exposure can adversely impact health, which may lead to more missed school.
- EPA has spent millions of dollars to hasten the transition of school bus fleets to cleaner vehicles.
- We find that this EPA clean bus funding program resulted in improved student attendance, especially in districts that replaced the oldest buses and in districts with high levels of estimated ridership on the replaced buses.
- EPA distributed this funding randomly, allowing us to causally assess the attendance impacts of school districts switching to cleaner buses.

Research Overview:
Approximately 25 million children ride buses to school in the United States (US). While school buses remain the safest school transport from an accident perspective, older buses often expose students to high levels of diesel exhaust. Since these exposures can adversely impact health, which may lead to more missed school, the US EPA has spent millions of dollars to hasten the transition of school bus fleets to cleaner vehicles. Here, we leveraged the randomized allocation of the EPA’s 2012-2017 School Bus Rebate Program funding to causally assess the district attendance impacts of upgrading buses. Districts randomly selected for funding had greater attendance improvements after the lottery as compared to unselected districts, resulting in over 350,000 estimated additional student-days of attendance each year (95% Confidence Interval (CI): -70,678, 772,865) due to the use of EPA funds. Attendance improvements were greatest when the oldest buses were replaced and for districts with high ridership on applicant buses. Extrapolating our results nationwide, we expect that the replacement of all pre-2000 model year school buses would lead to more than 1.3 million additional student-days of attendance per year (95% CI: 247,443, 2,406,511). Given the importance of attendance to educational success, we conclude that increasing the pace at which older, highly polluting buses are replaced positively impacts student attendance.

Methodology:
The data are used to assess the attendance impacts of the US EPA's School Bus Rebate Program. All analyses were conducted in SAS v9.4.

Instrument and/or Software specifications: NA

Files contained here:
The dataset and SAS code shared here were used to assess the attendance benefits of the US EPA's School Bus Rebate Program.
- DERA_Lottery_All_final.xlsx: analyses data used in this publication
- Bus_Funding_Attendance_Results_and_Tables_Nat_Sustain.sas: code to reproduce all results in this publication using the datset listed above

NOTE: The attendance data for two states, is masked because it was obtained through data agreements with the individual states, which preclude us from sharing that data publicly.

Related publication(s):
Pedde, M., Szpiro, A., Hirth, R., Adar, S.D. (2023). Randomized Design Evidence of the Attendance Benefits of the EPA School Bus Rebate Program. Nature Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-023-01088-7

Use and Access:
This data set is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC 4.0)

To Cite Data:
Pedde, M., Szpiro, A., Hirth, R., Adar, S.D. (2023). Dataset to Assess the Attendance Benefits of the US EPA School Bus Rebate Program [Data set]. University of Michigan - Deep Blue. https://doi.org/10.7302/tvhc-hq48

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