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