The Bremerton School District has two new additions to its fleet: two special-needs buses to replace two old ones.

Using funds provided by the state for the Transportation Fund, Marco DiCicco, supervisor of transportation for the school district, said they purchased the two buses at about $120,000 a piece, including tax.

DiCicco said that the replacements “don’t look like special-needs buses,” or at least, not the usual image of them. Instead, he said they look “more like regular buses.”

The buses, both brand new, can hold up to 38 students, according to DiCicco, thanks to the addition of “three-seaters” in the front half of the bus, which can hold three students instead of the regular two-seaters that come standard in special-needs buses.

They also come equipped with three security cameras inside, one in front, one in the middle and one in back of the buses. Regular buses have four cameras inside, but since these special-needs buses are 7 feet shorter, there is no need for a fourth camera, said DiCicco.

The two buses they replaced have already been sold, DiCicco said, and the funds were returned to the transportation fund. Those buses were sold in August, as the new buses were expected to be delivered in July. However, the district did not receive the new buses until last week.

“We, fortunately, had enough spare equipment to hold us, to get us through to this point,” DiCicco said.

DiCicco said that they’re just waiting to get license plates to move the buses into the “frontlines.”

He added that the district replaces an average of one to three school buses every year, in coordination with the state’s replacement schedule.

Because the money for replacement comes from the state, how old each bus within each school district is monitored. The more buses scheduled to be replaced, the more the specific school district receives in the transportation fund.

The average lifespan of a district bus is 15 years, according to DiCicco.

“We’ve got a really good fleet,” DiCicco said. “I think our average bus age is about 10 years old.”

However, DiCicco said that they generally keep buses a couple years past the replacement schedule.

“We keep it because you will overspend your account if you try to keep 100 percent of your fleet on the schedule,” DiCicco said.

He said the district is about three to four buses off schedule, “and that’s good.”

“We’ve been on a fleet program for the better part of a decade, just making sure we’re replenishing our fleet,” DiCicco said. “We have the newer average fleet in the entire peninsula.”

He said achieving that status is a matter of “managing purchases correctly, not overbuying, making sure we get a good price … basically being good stewards of the public’s money.”

Since the district only gets a certain amount of money from the state for the transportation vehicle fund — which can only be used for vehicle replacement or major maintenance, according to DiCicco — they often wait to purchase replacement vehicles to ensure there’s enough money in the account to cover the entire cost.

“Sometimes you have to … have a certain amount of money in the account,” DiCicco said. “We can’t overspend our account.”

He said that if necessary, school districts can run a transportation levy or bond to complement the funds, “but districts tend to not want to do that.”

Also to ensure the fleet is of the highest quality, DiCicco said the entire fleet is inspected every summer by the Washington State Patrol — the two new buses were inspected before arriving in Bremerton — and a random 25 percent of the fleet is inspected every winter. DiCicco said that 100 percent of the fleet passed the “very strict” inspected this year.

“If we get a good inspection, it’s because we earned it,” DiCicco said.

This year, DiCicco said he’s looking for two more special-needs buses and a regular bus to add to the fleet for the 2016-17 school year.

“You have to order somewhere between six to eight months out, and we always shoot for delivery in August, because that’s when we get money from the state,” DiCicco said.

He added that the timeline is pretty standard for all school districts in the state, though there are exceptions, such as when a district grows rapidly and needs to add another bus to its fleet to accommodate the increased student population.