The Environmental Protection Agency announced on Wednesday that 530 school districts across the country will receive nearly $900 million to replace diesel school buses with electric and natural gas ones.

In total, the funds will go towards 3,400 new school buses, the Biden administration said, 92% of which will be electric and the other 8% will be fueled by less pollutant propane or natural gas.

“When we send our kids off to school, we want to know they're entering a healthy environment where they can learn. But for millions of kids that iconic yellow school bus that takes them to school is polluting their air with diesel exhaust contributing to asthma and other serious health conditions,” said White House deputy chief of staff Natalie Quillian on a press call previewing the announcement on Tuesday. “Not only is this funding providing cleaner air, it's also helping tackle climate change and creating good-paying union jobs in electric school bus manufacturing.”

The funding comes from a pool of $5 billion allocated in the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, just over $1.8 billion of which went to a total of around 5,000 new buses prior to Wednesday. The full $5 billion is set to be spent by 2026.

"Diesel exhaust is a poison," Vice President Kamala Harris said after the first round of funding in 2022. "Breathing diesel fumes can cause headaches, and nausea. It can worsen asthma and chronic bronchitis. It can even elevate the risk of cancer."

The administration says they are prioritizing school districts in low-income, rural and tribal communities, which will receive about 67% of the latest round of dollars.

“We have a lot of demand out there for electric school buses from districts all across the country,” EPA administrator Michael Regan said on the Tuesday call. “As we begin to deliver these buses, we will definitely see those air quality impacts go down in a very measurable way.”

Regan, NAACP President Derrick Johnson and Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson will be in Jackson, Miss., for an event later on Wednesday to champion the investments.

A Harvard study released last week found that switching to electric buses would reduce “adult mortality and childhood asthma onset risks due to exposure to ambient fine particulate matter” and would amount to around $84,000 per bus in health and climate benefits.

“In a dense urban setting where old diesel buses still comprise most school bus fleets, the savings incurred from electrifying these buses outweigh the costs of replacement,” the study’s senior author and chair of Harvard’s Department of Environmental Health Kari Nadeau said in a statement. “Not to mention how the tangible benefits of electric school buses can improve lives — especially for racial minorities and those living in low-income communities who are disproportionately impacted by the everyday health risks of air pollution.”

But, Nadeau and the other researchers noted, the EPA’s program and the $5 billion set aside “can replace only around 15,000 buses, which amounts to just 3% of the [U.S. school bus] fleet and a small fraction of the roughly 200,000 highly polluting pre-2010 school buses in circulation.”

Electrifying the entire U.S. school bus fleet could cost as much as $200 billion, the researchers concluded.

The full list of school districts awarded funds for new buses through the EPA’s Clean School Bus Program can be found on the EPA website.