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Project Grade 9 Careers & CTE

Fenwold's Green Streets Crew: Writing the Job and Picking the Hire

A four-session grade 9 careers project: teams write a stormwater technician job posting for a fictional town, build a weighted scoring rubric, and rank three applicants.

Objectives

  1. Students will convert a maintenance calendar into the duties and requirements of a single job.
  2. Students will build a weighted scoring rubric in which every criterion is drawn from a stated job duty.
  3. Students will rank three applicants against their own rubric and defend the ranking in a memo.

Vocabulary

Bioswale
A bioswale is a wide, shallow, plant-lined channel that slows down stormwater and lets it soak in as it moves. You often see bioswales along parking lots and streets.

Also: job posting, essential duties, minimum qualifications, weighted criteria, commercial driver license

Teacher overview

Green infrastructure only works while someone maintains it, and the fictional town of Fenwold has reached the point where its bioswales and permeable parking bays need a full-time technician. Over four sessions, teams turn a maintenance calendar into a job posting, build a weighted scoring rubric, score three applicants, and recommend a hire to the public works director. The misconception this project is built to correct is the belief that the strongest applicant is simply the one with the most years of experience or the most schooling. A defensible hiring process scores only requirements that come from duties the job actually contains, and it gives every applicant the same chance to show each one, which means a team that adds a criterion no duty supports has to remove it.

Fenwold's Green Streets Crew: Writing the Job and Picking the Hire — Grade 9 Careers & CTE
Name: ____________________________ Date: ______________

Project Brief

Driving question: What should the fictional town of Fenwold require of its first stormwater maintenance technician, and which of three applicants best meets those requirements?

Scenario: Fenwold is a fictional town of about 18,000 people. Over the past six years its public works department has built 38 bioswales along residential streets and rebuilt 12 parking bays with permeable pavers. Until now, the street crew has maintained them between other jobs, and inspections show that about a third of the bioswales are clogged with sediment. The council has funded one full-time position. You are the hiring team.

The maintenance calendar the department keeps:

  • Spring: inspect all 38 bioswales for sediment and standing water, replant bare areas, and file an inspection record for each one.
  • Summer: mow and weed swale edges every three weeks, water new plantings during dry spells, and clear inlet grates after each storm over half an inch.
  • Autumn: remove leaf litter weekly from October through November, vacuum the 12 permeable bays with a regenerative air sweeper, and record the date each bay was cleaned.
  • Winter: keep salt away from swale plantings, respond to ice complaints, and repair snowplow damage to curb cuts in spring.
  • All year: operate a one-ton truck with a trailer, keep records the state stormwater permit requires, and answer resident questions at the curb.

Constraints, all set for this fictional scenario:

  • The department can fund exactly one position, at an hourly wage between $23.50 and $29.00 on the town pay scale, plus benefits.
  • Every requirement your team posts must trace to a duty listed in the maintenance calendar above, and your team must be able to say which one.
  • At least one skill must be listed as something the department will train rather than require, because the local applicant pool is small and a long requirement list leaves the position unfilled.
  • Vacuuming the permeable bays requires a commercial driver license, which takes about three months and a road test to obtain.
  • Scoring must use the same criteria for every applicant, applied to the written packet each one submitted.

The three applicants, all fictional:

  • Rosalind Abbey. Nine years on a landscaping crew, plants and equipment. No commercial driver license. Has never kept permit records. Available immediately.
  • Tobin Marsh. Two years as a seasonal public works laborer in a neighboring town, including leaf and storm-drain work. Holds a commercial driver license. Completed a one-semester stormwater certificate at the community college. Available in six weeks.
  • Perrine Callow. Four years as a highway maintenance worker for the county, strong recordkeeping, holds a commercial driver license. Little planting experience and no green infrastructure background. Available immediately.

Final deliverable: a one-page job posting with essential duties, minimum qualifications, trainable skills, and the posted wage range; a weighted scoring rubric whose criteria total 100 points; a completed score sheet for all three applicants; and a memo of about 350 words to the fictional public works director naming the recommended hire, the runner-up, and the reason the ranking came out that way.

Milestones

  1. Session 1, from calendar to duties. Read the maintenance calendar and write the essential duties of the job in six to eight statements, each beginning with a verb. Beside each duty, note the skill or credential it demands. Output: a duties-and-skills table.
  2. Session 2, the posting. Sort the skills into minimum qualifications, preferred qualifications, and skills the department will train. Choose a wage inside the posted range and write one sentence explaining what your choice is meant to attract and what it costs the department, which has to pay that wage every year. Write the posting. Output: the one-page job posting.
  3. Session 3, the scoring rubric. Build a rubric whose criteria total 100 points, assigning more points to the duties that take the most of the technician's year. Every criterion must name the duty it comes from. Then score all three applicants from their summaries, writing a short note for each score. Output: the rubric and three completed score sheets.
  4. Session 4, the recommendation. Rank the applicants, write the memo, and present the recommendation to the class, which acts as the fictional public works director and asks each team why a criterion was weighted as it was. Output: the finished memo and the answers given.

From Water for Schools (waterforschools.org). This material is in the public domain (CC0) and may be copied, edited, and shared freely.

Rubric
Criterion Emerging Developing Proficient Advanced
Duties drawn from the calendar Duties are generic and not traceable to the calendar Most duties trace to the calendar, with some invented Every duty traces to a task in the maintenance calendar Duties trace to the calendar and are ordered by how much of the technician's year each one takes
Requirements and trainability The posting requires everything, including skills the department said it would train The posting separates required from trained skills unevenly The posting lists minimum qualifications, preferred qualifications, and at least one trained skill, each tied to a duty The posting also explains why one skill was moved from required to trained and what that decision risks
Weighted scoring rubric Criteria are unweighted, or weights do not total 100 points Weights total 100 but several criteria have no duty behind them Criteria total 100 points, each names its duty, and all three applicants are scored the same way Weighting is justified by the share of the year each duty takes, and the team notes which criterion decided the ranking
Memo and defense The memo names a hire with no reference to scores The memo cites scores but not the reasoning behind the weights The memo names the hire and runner-up and explains the ranking from the rubric The memo also states what the department should do about the runner-up's gap, such as a training plan or a seasonal offer

Differentiation

Support

Give these teams the duties table from Session 1 already written, so their work begins at weighting and scoring. Provide a rubric shell with the four criteria named and the point values blank. Offer a memo frame with four labeled paragraphs: the job, the criteria, the scores, and the recommendation.

Extension

Ask these teams to write the three interview questions they would add, and to explain what each question measures that the paper packet could not. Then have them state how the ranking would change if the fictional town of Fenwold raised the posted wage to the top of its range, and who inside the department would feel that increase.

ELL supports

Pre-teach essential duties, minimum qualifications, preferred qualifications, weighted criteria, and bioswale using photographs or sketches of a planted swale and a permeable parking bay. Provide the applicant summaries as a comparison table with one row per applicant so students read across rather than through paragraphs. Allow score-sheet notes to be short phrases.

Extensions

Have each team post its job posting on the wall and walk the room as an applicant would, marking the postings they would apply to and the ones they would skip. Collect the reasons and discuss which requirements screened out people the fictional town of Fenwold actually wanted, which is what happens when a posting asks for credentials the work does not use.