Writing prompt Grade 10 English Language Arts
Should Bellow Ford Pay Landowners to Protect Its Watershed?
A grade 10 argument writing prompt weighing a filtration upgrade against paying upstream landowners for buffers, with an organizer, a full exemplar, and a rubric.
Objectives
- Students will write an argument recommending one of two funding options to a town council.
- Students will develop a counterclaim fairly and rebut it with reasoning rather than dismissal.
- Students will select evidence from a background packet rather than from general opinion.
Vocabulary
- Watershed
- A watershed is all the land where rain that falls will drain to the same stream, river, or lake. Everyone lives in a watershed, no matter how far from the water they live.
Also: riparian buffer, capital cost, counterclaim, rebuttal, rate base
Teacher overview
Towns that draw water from a river eventually face a choice between treating the water harder and keeping it cleaner upstream, and the choice is a budget question as much as an environmental one. This prompt gives students a fictional council decision with two defensible options and asks for an argument essay addressed to the council. The tension is real, because the cheaper option depends on landowners who are under no obligation to participate.
Prompt
Background. Everything in this scenario is fictional, including the town, the river, the figures, and the two proposals. One fact from outside the scenario is marked where it appears.
The town of Bellow Ford draws its drinking water from the Brackle River. About eighty percent of the land above the intake is farmland and woodlot, most of it privately owned. After heavy storms, the river carries enough soil and fertilizer past the intake that the treatment plant struggles. Twice last year the plant shut its intake for a day and drew down its finished water storage instead.
The plant is forty-one years old. The town's engineer has told the council that the plant needs another treatment stage to handle storm loads reliably. The council has two proposals in front of it.
| Item | Proposal A: Plant upgrade | Proposal B: Watershed program |
|---|---|---|
| What it does | Adds a filtration stage sized for storm loads | Pays landowners for streamside buffers, livestock fencing, and cover crops |
| Cost | 14 million dollars, borrowed over 20 years | 600,000 dollars per year for 20 years |
| Effect on a typical monthly bill | About 9 dollars more | About 4 dollars more |
| Certainty | The plant either meets the standard or it does not, and the town controls it | Depends on how many landowners sign up and stay enrolled |
| Time to full effect | Three years to build | Eight to twelve years for buffers to mature |
| Other results | None beyond treatment | Less flooding on lower roads, better fish habitat, some carbon storage |
The town's finance director notes that the median household in Bellow Ford already pays close to what is commonly considered a high burden for water and sewer combined. Outside the scenario, a widely used rule of thumb treats combined water and sewer costs above roughly 4.5 percent of household income as a high burden, which is the standard she is using. The figure adds two EPA benchmarks, 2.5 percent of income for drinking water and 2 percent for wastewater, although EPA has no single official cutoff.
The watershed coordinator for the county says that in similar programs elsewhere, sign-up in the first three years is usually well under half of the eligible acreage, and that programs which reach high enrollment do so by paying more per acre than Proposal B assumes.
The town engineer says that Proposal B may reduce the storm loads enough to postpone the upgrade, but that no watershed program removes the need for a plant that meets current standards on the worst day of the year.
Your task. Write an argument essay of 500 to 900 words addressed to the Bellow Ford town council. Recommend Proposal A or Proposal B. Support your recommendation with at least two reasons, each backed by specific evidence from the background above. Then state the strongest objection to your recommendation as its supporters would state it, and answer that objection. Conclude by telling the council what to do first.
Planning Organizer
Fill in every row before you draft. Each row matches a row of the rubric.
| Part | What to write | My notes |
|---|---|---|
| Claim | One sentence naming the proposal you recommend and the main reason. | |
| Reason 1 | A reason stated in one sentence. | |
| Evidence for reason 1 | The specific figure, quotation, or fact from the background that supports it. | |
| Reason 2 | A second reason, different in kind from the first. | |
| Evidence for reason 2 | The specific figure, quotation, or fact that supports it. | |
| Counterclaim | The strongest objection, written as a supporter of the other proposal would write it. | |
| What is true in it | The part of the objection you accept. | |
| Rebuttal | Why your recommendation still holds despite what you accepted. | |
| First step | What you want the council to do at its next meeting. |
Check two things before you draft. First, that your two reasons are different in kind, so that cost and certainty are not the same reason twice. Second, that your counterclaim would be recognized as fair by someone who holds it.
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
Members of the council, Bellow Ford should adopt Proposal B and fund the watershed program, because it is the only option that reduces the load on the plant instead of paying to treat it forever.
The first reason is cost to households that are already stretched. Proposal A raises a typical monthly bill by about nine dollars, while Proposal B raises it by about four. That gap matters more here than it would in a wealthier town. The finance director has told the council that the median household in Bellow Ford already pays close to what is commonly considered a high burden for water and sewer, and the standard she cites treats combined bills above roughly 4.5 percent of household income as burdensome. Adding the larger increase pushes families over a line the town should be trying to move away from.
The second reason is that Proposal B does work the plant upgrade cannot do. A filtration stage treats the river after the soil and fertilizer are already in it. Buffers and fencing keep part of that material out of the river to begin with, and the background lists three results the plant upgrade does not produce at all: less flooding on the lower roads, better fish habitat, and carbon storage. The town is buying one outcome with Proposal A and several with Proposal B.
The strongest objection comes from the town engineer, and it deserves to be stated plainly. No watershed program removes the need for a plant that meets the standard on the worst day of the year. Storms do not wait for buffers to mature, and buffers take eight to twelve years to do their full work. Meanwhile the county watershed coordinator says enrollment in the first three years is usually well under half of the eligible acreage, and that programs reaching high enrollment pay more per acre than this one assumes. A council that funds Proposal B alone may find in year five that it has higher bills, thin enrollment, and the same plant.
That objection is correct about the plant, and I accept it. The town will need the upgrade eventually. What the objection does not establish is that the town needs it now, at full size, and before anything else. The plant is forty-one years old and shut its intake twice last year, which is a serious record but not a failure to meet the standard. If the council funds the watershed program now and the storm loads fall, the eventual upgrade can be smaller and cheaper, because it will be sized for a river carrying less material. If enrollment disappoints, the council will know that within three years and can borrow for the plant then, having spent a fraction of what Proposal A would have committed.
The council should do three things at its next meeting. Fund Proposal B for an initial three-year term rather than twenty, set a written enrollment target for those three years, and direct the engineer to design the upgrade so it can be built in stages. That combination buys the cheaper option a fair test without pretending the plant question has gone away.
Rubric
| Criterion | Emerging | Developing | Proficient | Advanced |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claim | Names a topic but not a position, or shifts position during the essay. | States a position that is clear only by the end. | States a precise position in the opening paragraph and holds it throughout. | States a position that also specifies conditions or scope, such as an initial term or a staged approach. |
| Evidence and reasoning | Uses general opinion with little reference to the background. | Cites one item from the background, often without explaining its relevance. | Supports two distinct reasons with specific figures or quotations and explains how each supports the claim. | Weighs competing figures against each other and explains why one matters more in this town's situation. |
| Counterclaim and rebuttal | No counterclaim, or one stated only to dismiss it. | States a counterclaim accurately but answers it by repeating the original claim. | States the counterclaim as its supporters would, concedes what is true, and answers the remainder with reasoning. | Uses the concession to sharpen the recommendation, producing a proposal the opposing side would recognize as responsive. |
| Organization and conventions | Paragraphs are unordered and errors interfere with meaning. | Order is mostly logical; errors are noticeable but do not block meaning. | Paragraphs follow the reasoning, transitions connect them, and errors are minor. | Structure itself carries the argument, and the closing directs the council to a specific first step. |
Differentiation
Support
Provide the organizer with the claim row filled in for one proposal and a bank of six evidence statements taken from the background, which students sort into the two evidence rows. Reduce the length requirement to 400 to 600 words, and supply the counterclaim sentence so that students write only the concession and rebuttal.
Extension
Ask these students to write the essay as the county watershed coordinator, who supports the program but must acknowledge in writing that enrollment in comparable programs has been low. The essay must argue for the program while conceding the weakest part of its own record.
ELL supports
Pre-teach buffer, enrollment, burden, stage, and concede using the background table as the reference sheet. Provide paragraph frames for the counterclaim and rebuttal: "Supporters of Proposal ___ argue that ___. They are right that ___. Even so, ___." Allow students to record their claim and reasons orally before drafting.
Extensions
Have students find whether their own water utility publishes a source water protection plan and compare its approach to the two proposals here. Students can then write a one-paragraph note to the council explaining which local practice most resembles Proposal B.