Updated at 4:33 p.m.
A late-night fire on Wednesday destroyed four electric school buses charging in the parking lot of the Allen Brook School in Williston. The Vermont State Police Fire and Explosion Investigation Unit is investigating the cause. But there is “no reason to believe the origin of the fire is suspicious in nature,” according to Tyler Cohen, a Champlain Valley School District spokesperson.
A custodian working in the school noticed several buses ablaze and immediately called 911 at approximately 10:20 p.m. Eleven members of the Williston Fire Department responded to the scene within three minutes and extinguished the fire in another five minutes, according to a post on the department’s Facebook page. No injuries were reported.
Allen Brook School, which educates students in prekindergarten through second grade, and Williston Central, a school serving grades 3-8, were closed on Thursday due to limited bus access and to allow for professional cleanup. Allen Brook will also be closed on Friday to ensure that the school campus is clean and safe, Cohen said.
Champlain Valley superintendent Adam Bunting, who met with Vermont State Police at Allen Brook on Thursday morning, said in an interview that the school district is working on contingency plans for getting Williston kids to school. Several school districts had reached out offering to lend buses, he said.
The four destroyed vehicles were among eight electric buses that are part of the Champlain Valley School District’s fleet of 60 buses. The district received two electric buses in 2021 as part of a state-run grant program funded through a settlement with Volkswagen, but those buses weren’t being used this year because they had reached the end of their life cycle, according to Cohen. The district began operating the other six electric buses in September 2025. Highland Electric Fleets, a Massachusetts-based company, purchased the buses for approximately $400,000 each with help from a grant from the Environmental Protection Agency, Cohen said. The school district pays approximately $186,000 annually to lease the six buses, which are fully insured by both Highland and the school district.
The district will not use its remaining two electric buses until the investigation into the fire has concluded and it can ensure their safe use, Bunting said in a message to the school community Thursday afternoon.
The school district has experienced problems with the electric buses this school year related to charging effectiveness, according to Cohen. Highland is responsible for the maintenance of all electric infrastructure, including the EV chargers, he said. A message left for the company on Thursday was not immediately returned.
In 2021, the EPA created the Clean School Bus Program to reduce harmful emissions by replacing traditional school buses with electric ones. But that program is currently being reviewed under an “Unleashing American Energy” executive order issued by President Donald Trump. As of mid-2025, there were more than 5,000 electric school buses in operation across the country, according to the World Resources Institute.
Last year, around 1,200 electric school buses manufactured by Québec-based company Lion Electric were temporarily removed from the road following multiple school bus fires. Champlain Valley’s first two electric buses were manufactured by Lion, and the additional six were made by Thomas Built Buses, a subsidiary of Daimler Trucks North America.
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