Extremely frustrating.

A terrible experience.

A problem from the word “go.”

These are just some of the characterizations of the saga involving electric school buses provided to eight Maine school districts by Lion Electric, a now cash-strapped Canadian manufacturer. These buses, which we know to be very defective, have wreaked havoc throughout the state.

This utterly unacceptable experience amounts to a waste of time, and money and it exhibits official recklessness about something that should be taken seriously: America’s methodical transition away from fossil fuels, in this case, diesel.

And, discouragingly, this isn’t over yet; eliminating buses from a school fleet before the terms of a federal grant are up may result in the paying back of that grant money, an awkward reality that has districts opting to try to stay the course. Families and road users from Yarmouth to Vinalhaven are right to be alarmed.

“We would hit a bump and the whole bus would shut off,” Chris Fanelli, the facilities and transportation director for Camden-based Five Town Community School District, told the Kennebec Journal. “That was around the time the state grounded all of its vehicles. It was because of that.”

That urging by the Maine Department of Education was last February. At that time, Josh Wheeler, the transportation director for Winthrop Public Schools (and, if we may, surely one of Maine’s finest living examples of nominative determinism), reported a terrifying power steering failure, requiring him to veer into a snowbank to avoid crashing into traffic.

Mercifully, no schoolchildren were on board at the time.

Immediately phoning the school district’s superintendent from the snowbank, Wheeler reportedly said: “This is it. We’re done.”

Sometime after that, the company recalled a faulty part that put the Lion buses at risk of short-circuiting due to leaking water, leading to the loss of steering assistance (by that time a known risk in Winthrop) and a compromised braking system.

These school buses, however, have been the stuff of nightmares since their original dispatch in 2023. Even preliminary inspections by the Maine State Police Vehicle Inspection Unit revealed “loose body rivets, an inoperative drivers’ auxiliary fan, a power steering hose rubbing on a bracket and a rear emergency door check that did not work properly.”

Once the buses were out and in use, bus drivers promptly raised concerns about loose, “malfunctioning” windshields. Some buses were returned to the manufacturer for review and repair. A bus that appeared to be past saving was sent to Louisiana for an “autopsy.” And in their place? Diesel buses were rented.

When the introduction of electric school buses was first announced in 2022, a not-insignificant number of Maine school district officials, particularly those in rural areas with longer average journeys to school, expressed doubts and reservations as to the workability of their introduction. They could not have known that charging range would be the very least of their concerns.

It is, to put it lightly, deeply unfortunate that Maine’s first interaction with the Clean School Bus Program, a rebate initiative managed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, has panned out this way. By 2035, the agency wants 75% of all new American public school buses to be electric.

What should have been a bold and encouraging step in the right direction, one funded by the federal government to the tune of $5 billion nationally, has stirred disillusionment and doubt in our communities. Not only, then, do we not have safe and dependable fleets of school buses, we have a vexing breach of public faith and trust that will take some recovering from.

“We have tried really hard to be positive, but as these issues have dragged on, here we are in December, and two buses are still not working and it’s harder and harder to be positive,” Winthrop Superintendent Jim Hodgkin told the Kennebec Journal … 12 months ago.

Speaking earlier this month, the superintendent of the Yarmouth School Department said that its experience with Lion means it won’t lightly broach the subject of electrification again.

Giving voice to the extent of the setback, Andrew Dolloff did not mince words: “It’s giving EVs a bad reputation,” he said.