Writing prompt Grade 12 English Language Arts
Recommending Colverton's Next Water Source: An Argument Prompt
A grade 12 argument writing prompt in which students recommend one of three water supply options to a fictional town board, with an organizer, exemplar, and rubric.
Objectives
- Students will state a defensible claim that answers the board's question rather than restating it.
- Students will select evidence from a mixed packet of costs, yields, and outside facts.
- Students will develop a counterclaim fairly and answer it without conceding the recommendation.
Vocabulary
- Indirect potable reuse
- Recycling water into drinking water with a natural stop along the way. Highly cleaned water is put into the ground or a reservoir, then drawn back out later and treated again for drinking.
Also: yield, capital cost, affordability, counterclaim, rebuttal
Teacher overview
A water utility facing a shortfall chooses among options that differ in cost, in how quickly they can be built, in who bears the risk, and in how much of the problem they actually solve. This prompt puts students in front of that kind of decision with a briefing packet from a fictional town, and asks for a recommendation that survives the strongest objection to it. The affordability evidence is deliberately double-edged, so that a student who reads only the average household figures will miss the objection the board is most likely to raise.
Prompt
Background: the Colverton briefing packet
Colverton is a fictional town of about 26,000 people. Its water comes from Thornsett Reservoir, which is filled by snowmelt and spring rain. Over the past five summers the reservoir has averaged 62 percent of capacity, down from 88 percent in the decade before that. The town's engineers project that by 2040 Colverton will be short about 0.9 MGD during a dry summer. Average demand today is about 3.2 MGD.
The Colverton Water Authority board has narrowed the choices to three. All costs below are the fictional utility's own estimates.
Option A. Advanced treatment and reservoir blending. Colverton would build an advanced treatment plant to purify its own treated wastewater and pipe it back into Thornsett Reservoir, where it would mix with the existing supply before going through the drinking water plant. Yield is about 1.2 MGD, more than the projected shortfall. Capital cost is about $46 million, and the utility estimates it would add about $22.50 to the average monthly household water bill. The approach is proven at scale: Orange County's Groundwater Replenishment System in California is the world's largest indirect potable reuse facility at 130 million gallons per day. Colverton's own surveys found that a little under half of residents said they would be uncomfortable drinking blended water.
Option B. A pipeline from the Ostley Valley district. Colverton would build a pipeline and contract to buy up to 1.5 MGD from a neighboring district that has surplus supply. Capital cost is about $31 million, adding about $15.70 to the average monthly bill. The contract would run 20 years, with the price renegotiated every five years. Ostley Valley's own demand is growing, and its board has not committed to renewing after the contract ends.
Option C. A mandatory conservation program. Colverton would fund rebates for efficient fixtures, replace aging meters, and impose summer watering restrictions with penalties. Capital cost is about $4 million, adding about $2.40 to the average monthly bill. The engineers project a 14 percent cut in demand, or about 0.45 MGD, which closes roughly half the projected shortfall and nothing more.
Affordability figures. The average Colverton household now pays about $68 a month for water and about $52 a month for sewer. Median household income in Colverton is about $54,000, and roughly one household in six earns under $28,000. A widely used rule of thumb, built by adding two EPA benchmarks, treats combined water and sewer costs above roughly 4.5 percent of household income as a high burden, although EPA has no single official cutoff. Nationally, combined water and sewer bills rose about 24 percent from 2019 to 2024 and about 5.1 percent in 2025, outpacing inflation.
Your task
Write an argument of 700 to 900 words addressed to the Colverton Water Authority board. Recommend one option, or a combination of options if you can show why the combination is better than any single choice. Support your recommendation with specific figures from the packet. Develop the strongest objection to your recommendation fairly, in its own paragraph, and then answer it. Close by naming the one thing the board should do first.
Planning Organizer
Fill in every box before you draft. Together, the boxes cover every row of the rubric.
| Box | What goes here | My notes |
|---|---|---|
| Claim | The option you recommend, stated as a sentence the board could vote on. Do not restate the question. | |
| Reason 1 | The strongest reason your option is right for Colverton, in one sentence. | |
| Evidence for Reason 1 | Two figures from the packet, with units, that support Reason 1. | |
| Reason 2 | A second, different reason, not a restatement of the first. | |
| Evidence for Reason 2 | One figure from the packet and one fact from outside Colverton. | |
| Counterclaim | The strongest argument against your option, stated so its supporters would agree you have it right. | |
| Evidence behind the counterclaim | The figure or fact that makes the counterclaim strong. | |
| Rebuttal | Why the counterclaim does not defeat your recommendation. Concede what is true before you answer it. | |
| First step | The single action the board should take first, and why that one. |
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
Colverton should build the advanced treatment plant and blend purified water into Thornsett Reservoir, and it should pair that project with the conservation program in Option C. Option A would give Colverton a supply it owns, while Option B would give it a supply it rents under a contract whose price has to be renegotiated three times over its 20-year term.
The first reason is yield. The engineers project a shortfall of about 0.9 MGD in a dry summer by 2040. Option A produces about 1.2 MGD, which covers the shortfall with room left over. Option C on its own produces about 0.45 MGD, roughly half the gap, and the packet says plainly that it closes nothing more than that. A board that adopts conservation alone has accepted a shortfall in exactly the dry years the plan exists to cover.
The second reason is control. Option B is cheaper to build, at about $31 million against $46 million, and it adds about $15.70 to the monthly bill rather than about $22.50. Those numbers are real advantages. What they buy is a 20-year contract whose price is reopened every five years, from a district whose own demand is growing and whose board has not committed to renewing. Colverton would be negotiating from need each time. The advanced treatment plant, once built, produces water from a source Colverton already controls, because the town's own wastewater does not depend on another district's surplus. Indirect potable reuse is not experimental: Orange County has operated the world's largest such facility at 130 million gallons per day.
The strongest objection is affordability, and it is a serious one. The average household pays about $120 a month for water and sewer combined. Adding about $22.50 brings that to roughly $142.50. Against a median income of about $54,000, that is well under the widely used 4.5 percent rule of thumb for a high burden, which works out to about $202 a month. Yet the average household is not the household at risk. Roughly one Colverton household in six earns under $28,000, and for those households the 4.5 percent threshold is about $105 a month. They are already above it before the board approves anything. National bills rose about 24 percent between 2019 and 2024 and about 5.1 percent in 2025, so the pressure is not going to ease on its own.
That objection changes how Colverton should build Option A, but it does not change what Colverton should build. Every option on the table raises bills, including Option C, and the cheapest option leaves half the shortfall in place, which is its own cost the first time the town has to impose emergency restrictions. The answer is to pair the project with a customer assistance program funded inside the rate structure, so that the households under $28,000 are held near their current bill while the rest of the system carries the capital. Pairing Option A with Option C also lowers the total: every gallon conservation saves is a gallon the new plant does not have to produce, which lets the board size the plant closer to 1.0 MGD and shave the capital cost. The public comfort finding, with a little under half of residents uneasy about blended water, argues for a two-year public education effort rather than for a different project, since the same discomfort would have to be answered eventually in any drought severe enough to force reuse.
The board's first step should be to commission the rate study that prices Option A together with a low-income assistance tier. Until the board knows what the project does to the bill of a household earning $28,000, it does not yet know what it is voting on.
Rubric
| Criterion | Emerging | Developing | Proficient | Advanced |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claim and recommendation | Names an option without stating a recommendation the board could act on. | States a recommendation but restates the question or hedges among options. | States a clear, votable recommendation and holds to it throughout. | States a precise recommendation, including scope or conditions, and every paragraph advances it. |
| Evidence and reasoning | Uses one or two figures, some inaccurately, with little reasoning attached. | Uses several accurate figures but leaves the reasoning between figure and claim implicit. | Uses accurate figures with units and explains how each supports the reason it sits under. | Selects figures the other options cannot answer, and shows why one figure outweighs another. |
| Counterclaim and rebuttal | Mentions no objection, or names one and dismisses it. | States an objection but weakens it before answering it. | States the objection fairly, concedes what is true, and answers it with evidence. | States the objection at full strength, concedes precisely, and shows how the recommendation changes in response without collapsing. |
| Organization and conventions | Paragraphs do not correspond to the parts of the argument; errors interfere with meaning. | Structure is visible but the counterclaim or first step is buried; some distracting errors. | Each paragraph does one job, transitions are clear, and errors are minor. | Structure is controlled for effect, with the first step earned by the paragraphs before it, and prose is clean throughout. |
Differentiation
Support
Give these students the briefing packet with the three options in a comparison table already built, showing yield, capital cost, and monthly bill impact side by side, so the selection work is separated from the reading work. Assign a 500-word minimum instead of 700, and provide the counterclaim in the organizer already stated, leaving the concession and the rebuttal for the student to write.
Extension
Ask students to write the two-page dissent a board member would file if the board adopted a different option from the one they recommended. The dissent must use only figures from the packet, must not repeat any sentence from their essay, and must name the specific future event that would prove the dissent right.
ELL supports
Pre-teach "yield," "capital cost," "burden," and "counterclaim" with one plain sentence each, and supply a bank of concession and rebuttal openers, such as "It is true that ..." and "That figure matters, yet ...". Allow students to complete the organizer in bullet phrases and to talk through the counterclaim box with a partner before writing it.
Extensions
Have students prepare the three-minute oral version of their recommendation for a mock board meeting, then deliver it while classmates play board members who have read only the cost column of the fictional packet. Afterward, students write a short reflection identifying which figure they had to explain twice and revising the essay paragraph where that figure first appears.