Writing prompt Grade 9 Careers & CTE
Teasdale Irrigation: Retrain the Crew or Hire New Technicians?
A grade 9 careers argument prompt: students advise a fictional irrigation district's board on retraining its ditch riders or hiring certified irrigation technicians.
Objectives
- Students will write an argument recommending one workforce option to a district board.
- Students will support a claim with evidence drawn from supplied district records.
- Students will state and rebut the strongest counterclaim against their recommendation.
Vocabulary
Key words: ditch rider, telemetry, attrition, certificate program, institutional knowledge, counterclaim
Teacher overview
When a workplace automates part of its work, someone has to decide what happens to the people who did that work by hand. This prompt puts students in front of a fictional irrigation district's board with two defensible options and enough records to argue either one. The tension is real in the water sector, where field knowledge accumulates over decades and cannot be hired quickly, while the equipment replacing the old routine arrives on a fixed delivery date. Students write an argument of about 500 words recommending one option, and the strongest responses treat the rejected option as reasonable rather than foolish.
Prompt
Background. The fictional Teasdale Irrigation District delivers water to 240 farms through 31 miles of canal. Nine ditch riders run the system today. They open and close headgates by hand, read staff gauges, log each delivery on paper, and patrol the banks for leaks. The riders average 14 years of service, and six of the nine can retire within eight years.
The board has approved a modernization package. Forty automated gates and sixty soil moisture stations will report to a control room, and the equipment arrives in ten months. After installation, the daily work changes. Someone must calibrate sensors, troubleshoot telemetry that drops out in a storm, read the data, schedule deliveries from a screen, and still drive out to fix a gate that will not close.
The board is weighing two options, and all figures below are set for this fictional scenario.
Option A, retrain the current crew. All nine riders complete an irrigation technology certificate at the community college over eighteen months. The district pays $9,000 per person in tuition and $4,000 per person in paid release time, for a total near $117,000. Riders keep their seniority and their current pay scale. Two riders have told the manager they would retire rather than go back to school.
Option B, hire certified technicians. The district hires four technicians who already hold the certificate, at a wage $4.80 per hour above the rider scale, and lets the rider crew shrink through retirements rather than layoffs. The added payroll runs about $40,000 per year. New technicians would need a full irrigation season to learn which headgates leak, which laterals silt in first, and which farms call before dawn.
What the district's own records show.
- Last year the riders found 23 of the 26 canal breaks before any farmer reported them.
- The nearest certificate program graduates about twelve students a year, and three irrigation districts recruit from it.
- The automated gates arrive in ten months, while the certificate takes eighteen months to finish.
- Two of the nine riders already maintain the district's radio equipment and pump controls.
Your task. Write an argument of about 500 words addressed to the Teasdale Irrigation District board recommending Option A or Option B. State your claim clearly. Support it with at least two specific pieces of evidence from the background above, and explain how each piece of evidence supports your claim rather than simply naming it. Then state the strongest argument against your recommendation, and respond to it. Close by telling the board what you would watch over the next year to know whether the decision was working.
Planning Organizer
Fill in every row before you draft. Each row becomes at least one paragraph.
| Section | What goes here | Your notes |
|---|---|---|
| Claim | The option you recommend, stated in one sentence | |
| Reason 1 | Your first reason, in your own words | |
| Evidence for Reason 1 | The specific record or figure from the background that supports it | |
| Explanation | Why that evidence supports the reason, in two or three sentences | |
| Reason 2 | Your second reason | |
| Evidence for Reason 2 | The specific record or figure that supports it | |
| Explanation | Why that evidence supports the reason | |
| Counterclaim | The strongest argument someone would make for the other option | |
| Rebuttal | Your response, which should concede what is true before answering | |
| What to watch | One measurable sign in the next year that the decision is working |
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 Teasdale Irrigation District should retrain its current nine ditch riders rather than hire four outside technicians. The equipment arriving in ten months is new to this district, but the canal is not, and the knowledge that keeps water moving through it lives with the people already on the crew.
The district's own outage record is the strongest reason. Last year the riders found 23 of the 26 canal breaks before a farmer ever called. That number reflects what the riders know about the canal, such as which bank seeps after a wet spring and which lateral silts in first, and that knowledge took years of driving the same route to build. Automated gates will report a gate position, and soil moisture stations will report a reading, but neither will tell the control room that the bank below Gate 14 always softens after the first heavy irrigation. If four new technicians replace that crew, the district loses the early warning that kept most of those 26 breaks from becoming emergencies.
The second reason is that the district already has people doing the new work. Two riders maintain the radio equipment and the pump controls today, which means troubleshooting telemetry is not a foreign skill on this crew. Training builds on what those two already know and gives the rest of the crew a person to ask on a Saturday. Hiring from outside puts that same troubleshooting in the hands of someone who is also still learning the canal, and asks them to learn both at once.
The board will reasonably object that the certificate takes eighteen months while the gates arrive in ten, leaving eight months when the equipment is running and the crew is not yet trained. That gap is real, and it is the honest weakness in this recommendation. The district can narrow it by hiring one certified technician now, rather than four, to carry the control room through the first season and to coach the riders who are still in class. One hire costs far less than four, and it keeps the crew that finds the breaks. The two riders who said they would retire rather than return to school should be allowed to do so, which reduces the training bill and opens a position the district can fill later with a graduate of the certificate program.
Over the next year, the board should watch one number above all others: the share of canal breaks that the district finds before a farmer reports one. If that share holds near last year's level through the transition, the knowledge the district was trying to keep has survived the change in equipment. If it falls, the board will know quickly that the training pace is too slow and can hire a second technician before a break becomes a lost irrigation turn.
Rubric
| Criterion | Emerging | Developing | Proficient | Advanced |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claim | No clear recommendation, or the recommendation shifts during the essay | A recommendation is stated but is vague about which option it means | A clear one-sentence claim names Option A or Option B and holds throughout | The claim is clear, holds throughout, and is qualified in a way the evidence actually supports |
| Evidence and reasoning | Little or no evidence from the background, or evidence is invented | One piece of evidence appears, named but not explained | At least two specific pieces of evidence from the background are named and explained in the writer's own words | Evidence is specific, explained, and connected to each other so the reasons build rather than repeat |
| Counterclaim and rebuttal | No counterclaim, or the other option is dismissed without argument | A counterclaim is named but not answered | The strongest opposing argument is stated fairly and answered with reasoning | The rebuttal concedes what is true in the counterclaim before answering, and the concession changes the recommendation in some concrete way |
| Organization and conventions | Paragraphs are unordered and errors interfere with meaning | Some structure is present, with errors that distract | Clear paragraphs follow the organizer, with few errors | Structure moves the argument forward deliberately, closing with a measurable sign the board can watch |
Differentiation
Support
Give these students the claim sentence written two ways, one for each option, and let them choose one before planning. Provide the four background records as separate cards so evidence can be selected physically rather than located in a paragraph. Offer paragraph frames: my recommendation is, the district's records show, this matters because, some board members would argue, and I would answer that.
Extension
Ask these students to write a second version addressed to the nine riders themselves rather than to the board, and then to note in three sentences what changed and why. Audience changes which costs need to be named out loud, and the fictional district's $117,000 training bill reads very differently to a board than to the people being trained.
ELL supports
Pre-teach ditch rider, telemetry, attrition, certificate program, and counterclaim with a labeled picture of a canal, a headgate, and a control room screen. Provide the background as a two-column comparison table so students can read Option A against Option B line by line. Allow the first draft to use short sentences with the connectives supplied: because, however, although, and therefore.
Extensions
Have students hold a short board meeting in which two writers present opposing recommendations and the rest of the class votes after asking questions. Then ask each writer to revise one paragraph in response to a question they could not answer at the meeting, which is closer to how a real recommendation reaches a final vote.