Writing prompt Grade 10 Careers & CTE
Ashenmoor's Workforce Budget: Apprentices or Signing Bonuses
A grade 10 careers argument prompt asking students to recommend how a water utility should spend its workforce budget, with a planning organizer, exemplar, and rubric.
Objectives
- Students will state a precise claim recommending one use of a utility's workforce budget.
- Students will support the claim with at least three pieces of evidence from the background material.
- Students will address a counterclaim and explain why their recommendation still holds.
Vocabulary
- Apprenticeship
- A way to learn a skilled job by working alongside experienced workers while getting paid. Water utilities use apprenticeships to train new operators and technicians.
Also: signing bonus, vacancy, turnover, marginal cost
Teacher overview
Students write an argument recommending how a small utility should spend its workforce budget. The choice is between starting a three-year apprenticeship for local graduates and paying signing bonuses to recruit operators who already hold licenses. Utility boards face this choice in real communities, because one option fills a vacancy quickly while the other develops an operator who may stay for a career. Two points are worth settling before students draft. A signing bonus is not the same tool as a wage, since a bonus is paid once and does not change what the job pays afterward, so a worker recruited by a bonus can be recruited away by the next one. An apprentice is an employee rather than a student, since in a registered apprenticeship the apprentice works productive hours for pay from the first week, which changes the cost comparison considerably.
Prompt
Background. Ashenmoor is a fictional town of 26,000 people. Its water utility runs one treatment plant and the pipes that serve the town. The utility has eleven operator positions, and three of them are vacant. Two of the three have been open for more than a year. The board has set aside a workforce budget of $150,000 to fix the problem, and it must choose one plan.
Option A, the apprenticeship. The utility would start a three-year registered apprenticeship for two graduates of Ashenmoor High School. The apprentices would earn wages from the operations payroll. The workforce budget would pay about $50,000 a year for three years to cover tuition at a partner college, a stipend for the operators who mentor them, and exam fees. If both finish, the utility gains two licensed operators in the third year. The partner college is thirty miles away. In the fictional utility's record, one of the last two apprentices it sponsored left before finishing.
Option B, the signing bonuses. The utility would offer a $15,000 signing bonus to three operators who already hold licenses, at a total cost of $45,000. Recruiters believe all three vacancies could be filled within about six months. In the fictional utility's record, two of the last three operators hired with a bonus left within two years for another utility that offered more.
What is true beyond Ashenmoor. Operators typically enter the field with a high school diploma, on-the-job training, and a state license earned by exam. Licenses run in classes tied to plant size and experience. Median pay for water and wastewater operators was $60,020 per year in May 2025, with the top ten percent earning over $91,060. About 10,000 operator openings are projected each year from 2025 to 2035, and all of them come from retirements and career changes. Roughly one-third of the water workforce becomes retirement-eligible within the next decade, while in 2016 only about 10 percent of water workers were 24 or younger, compared with 12.5 percent of all U.S. workers.
Your task. Write an argument to the Ashenmoor Utility Board recommending Option A or Option B. State a precise claim. Support it with at least three pieces of evidence from the background. Name the strongest objection to your recommendation and answer it. Close by stating what the board should do and what it should watch for. Write four to six paragraphs.
Planning Organizer
Fill in every row before you draft. Each row becomes at least one sentence in your argument.
| Part of the argument | What you will write |
|---|---|
| Claim: which option the board should choose, stated in one sentence | |
| Reason 1, and the evidence from the background that supports it | |
| Reason 2, and the evidence from the background that supports it | |
| Reason 3, and the evidence from the background that supports it | |
| The marginal cost of your option: what the board gives up to fund it | |
| The marginal benefit of your option: what the board gets that it does not have now | |
| Counterclaim: the strongest argument for the option you rejected | |
| Rebuttal: why your recommendation still holds despite that argument | |
| Conclusion: what the board should do, and one sign that would show it worked |
From Water for Schools (waterforschools.org). This material is in the public domain (CC0) and may be copied, edited, and shared freely.
Exemplar & Rubric
Exemplar response
The Ashenmoor Utility Board should spend its workforce budget on the three-year apprenticeship rather than on signing bonuses. The bonus fills the three positions faster, and speed matters when two of them have sat open for a year. Even so, the apprenticeship is the only option that adds licensed operators to the region instead of moving them from one utility to another.
The first reason is that the shortage is national, not local. About 10,000 operator openings are projected each year from 2025 to 2035, and all of them come from retirements and career changes rather than from new plants. A bonus does not create an operator. It persuades one to change employers, which leaves the vacancy somewhere else and invites the next utility to make the same offer here.
The second reason is that Ashenmoor's own record shows how briefly a bonus holds. Two of the last three operators the utility recruited with a bonus left within two years for a utility that paid more. A one-time payment does not change what the job pays after the first year, so the utility would face the same three vacancies again while having spent $45,000.
The third reason is that the apprenticeship builds people who are already rooted in Ashenmoor. Operators enter the field with a high school diploma, on-the-job training, and a state license earned by exam, so a local graduate needs no four-year degree to start. The apprentices earn wages from the first week and do productive work while they qualify. Median operator pay was $60,020 per year in May 2025, and the top ten percent earned over $91,060, so the utility can honestly present this as a career rather than a stopgap job. That matters in a field where, in 2016, only about 10 percent of water workers were 24 or younger, compared with 12.5 percent of all U.S. workers.
The strongest objection is timing. The apprenticeship delivers no licensed operator until the third year, and the plant has to run tonight. That objection is serious, and it deserves a real answer rather than a dismissal. The answer is that two of the three positions have already been open for more than a year, which means the utility has survived a year of the condition the bonus is supposed to prevent. Three more years of a known problem is worse than one more year of it, yet it is not worse than paying $45,000 to repeat the same problem within two years.
The board should fund the apprenticeship and set one clear test for it. If both apprentices are still enrolled and passing coursework at the end of the first year, the plan is working. If one leaves, as one of the last two sponsored apprentices did, the board should ask why before it sponsors the next pair. The utility's problem is larger than a single round of hiring, because it needs a reliable way to produce the operators it will keep needing.
Rubric
| Criterion | Emerging | Developing | Proficient | Advanced |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claim | No clear recommendation, or the position shifts between paragraphs | Recommends an option but states it vaguely | States a precise recommendation in one sentence and holds it throughout | States a precise recommendation, holds it, and limits it to what the evidence actually supports |
| Evidence and reasoning | Uses no evidence from the background | Uses one piece of evidence, or uses evidence without explaining it | Uses at least three pieces of evidence and explains how each supports the claim | Uses at least three pieces of evidence, explains each, and distinguishes the fictional Ashenmoor figures from the national data |
| Marginal cost and benefit | Names neither a cost nor a benefit | Names a cost or a benefit but not both | Names a specific cost and a specific benefit of the recommended option | Names costs and benefits for both options and explains which comparison decides the recommendation |
| Counterclaim and rebuttal | No counterclaim appears | Names a counterclaim but does not answer it | States the strongest opposing argument and answers it with evidence | States the strongest opposing argument, grants what is true in it, and explains why the recommendation still holds |
| Organization and conventions | Paragraphs are unordered and errors interfere with meaning | Structure is present but transitions are missing; errors distract | Four to six organized paragraphs with clear transitions and few errors | Purposeful paragraph order, controlled transitions, and clean conventions throughout |
Differentiation
Support
Provide the claim sentence in two versions, one for each option, and let students choose one and revise it rather than compose from nothing. Give a highlighted background sheet where the six most usable pieces of evidence are already marked, and allow a four-paragraph response with the counterclaim and rebuttal in the same paragraph.
Extension
Ask students to write a second, shorter memo arguing the option they rejected, then a one-paragraph note explaining which of the two arguments they find stronger and why. Students who want a harder version can propose a third plan that splits the fictional budget between one apprentice and one bonus, and defend the split against the objection that it does neither thing well.
ELL supports
Pre-teach "apprenticeship," "signing bonus," "vacancy," "turnover," and "counterclaim" with short definitions and a two-column picture chart comparing the two options over three years. Provide paragraph frames such as "The board should choose ___ because ___." and "Some board members will say ___, but ___." Allow the counterclaim paragraph to be planned orally with a partner before it is written.
Extensions
Have students find a real registered apprenticeship in the water sector, since state apprenticeship agencies and many large utilities publish their program descriptions, and compare its length, wage progression, and classroom hours with the fictional Ashenmoor plan. Students can also interview an adult who changed careers and ask what actually moved the decision, then write one paragraph on whether a signing bonus would have mattered to that person. Both extensions ask students to weigh factors other than pay in how people choose or leave a job.