Writing prompt Grade 12 English Language Arts
Covering Fairvale's Lorimer Reservoir: An Argument Prompt
A grade 12 argument writing prompt in which students recommend one of two ways a fictional city can meet the rule against uncovered finished water storage.
Objectives
- Students will state an argumentative claim that recommends one option and names the trade-off it accepts.
- Students will support a claim with figures drawn from a provided option sheet rather than general assertion.
- Students will develop a counterclaim about public access and answer it without conceding the claim.
Vocabulary
- Finished water
- Finished water is water that has been through every treatment step and is ready to be sent to homes and schools. It has to meet strict safety rules before it leaves the plant.
- Turbidity
- Turbidity is a measure of how cloudy or murky water looks because of tiny particles floating in it. Clear water has low turbidity, and muddy water has high turbidity.
Also: uncovered storage, counterclaim, rebuttal, operating cost
Teacher overview
Treated drinking water held in an open basin is exposed to birds, runoff, and algae after it has already been through the plant, and federal rules now require systems to cover such storage or to treat what leaves it. For a city whose open reservoir sits inside a well-used park, meeting that requirement is a genuine argument rather than a technical formality, because every compliant option takes something the public values. This prompt gives students the option sheet a fictional city council would actually see and asks for a recommendation with a developed rebuttal. The rubric rewards students who name what their own recommendation costs.
Prompt
Fairvale is a fictional city of about forty thousand people, and every document in this prompt was written for this assignment. Read the background and the option sheet, then complete the writing task.
Background
Lorimer Reservoir holds twelve million gallons of finished water, meaning water that has already been filtered and disinfected at the treatment plant. It sits in the middle of Ashmead Park. A paved loop runs along its shoreline, and the overlook at the north end is the most photographed spot in the city. The reservoir has been open to the sky since it was built in 1948.
Open storage of finished water creates a real risk. Birds land on it. Wind carries dust and pollen onto it. Runoff from the surrounding slope reaches it during heavy rain. Any of these can raise turbidity or introduce organisms after the treatment step that was supposed to remove them. Under EPA's Long Term 2 Enhanced Surface Water Treatment Rule, a system with an uncovered finished-water reservoir must cover it or treat the water leaving it, because contamination that enters after the plant is not caught by the plant's own treatment.
The city must choose one of two compliant options within the next budget cycle. All figures below come from the city engineer's report and are fictional.
Option sheet
| Item | Option A, buried covered tank | Option B, netting and outlet treatment |
|---|---|---|
| Capital cost | $18,400,000 | $9,600,000 |
| Added annual operating cost | $40,000 | $310,000 |
| Expected service life | 80 years | 30 years |
| Construction period, park loop closed | 24 months | 7 months |
| Public access when finished | Full, with a lawn and overlook on the tank roof | Loop reopens, shoreline path permanently fenced |
| Open water visible from the park | No | Yes, behind fencing and netting |
Fairvale funds water projects through water rates. The city's finance director notes that combined water and sewer bills across the country rose about 24 percent from 2019 to 2024 and about 5.1 percent in 2025, faster than inflation, and that Fairvale's own rates have followed the same pattern. She has said that either option will require a rate increase, and that Option A's would be larger in the first years and smaller after the borrowing is repaid.
Writing task
Write an argument of 700 to 900 words addressed to the Fairvale City Council recommending either Option A or Option B. Support your recommendation with specific figures from the option sheet and specific reasoning about risk, cost, and public use of the park. Develop the strongest objection a reader could raise against your recommendation, then answer it. Close by naming what your own recommendation costs the city and why that cost is worth accepting.
Planning Organizer
Complete every row before you draft. Together, the rows cover every criterion in the rubric, so a fully completed organizer already contains everything the rubric scores.
| Element | What to write | My notes |
|---|---|---|
| Claim | One sentence recommending Option A or Option B, naming the single strongest reason. | |
| Reason 1 | State the reason in your own words. | |
| Evidence for reason 1 | A specific figure or condition from the option sheet or the background. Copy it exactly. | |
| Reasoning for reason 1 | Two or three sentences explaining how that figure supports the reason. Do not restate the figure. | |
| Reason 2 | State a second, different reason. It must not repeat reason 1 in other words. | |
| Evidence for reason 2 | A second specific figure or condition. | |
| Reasoning for reason 2 | Two or three sentences connecting it to the claim. | |
| Counterclaim | The strongest objection to your recommendation, stated fairly and in full. | |
| Rebuttal | Your answer to it, using evidence rather than assertion. | |
| Cost of your own position | The thing your recommendation takes away, and why it is worth accepting. | |
| Conclusion | One sentence the council could act on. |
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, Option A
To the Fairvale City Council: the city should build the buried covered tank at Lorimer Reservoir and treat the two-year closure of the park loop as the price of a solution that lasts. Option B is cheaper to build and faster to finish, and for those reasons it is the easier vote. It is also the option Fairvale will have to revisit within a generation.
The first reason is the service life on the engineer's own sheet. Option A is expected to last eighty years and Option B thirty. A student entering Fairvale High School this fall would be in her forties when the Option B installation reaches the end of its life, and the council of that year would face this same choice again, with the same disruption to the same park. The city has already lived through one version of this decision, since Lorimer has stood open since 1948 and the federal requirement to do something about it arrived decades later. Choosing the shorter-lived option schedules a second version of today's argument rather than settling it.
The second reason is what the two options actually do about the risk. The problem at Lorimer is that finished water, already filtered and disinfected, sits open to birds, dust, and slope runoff, and that anything entering it there has already passed the plant's treatment. Option A removes the exposure. Option B leaves the water open to the sky and adds treatment at the outlet to correct whatever gets in. Treatment that corrects a problem must run correctly every day, and the annual operating cost of Option B, at $310,000 against $40,000 for Option A, is a fair measure of how much more there is to run and to get wrong. Under EPA's Long Term 2 Enhanced Surface Water Treatment Rule the city must either cover the reservoir or treat the water leaving it. Option A meets that rule by removing the source of the contamination; Option B commits the city to catching the contamination after it happens.
The strongest objection to this recommendation is the park. Option A closes the shoreline loop for twenty-four months rather than seven, and it removes the open water from view permanently, while Option B reopens the loop in well under a year and keeps the water visible behind fencing. The overlook is the most photographed place in Fairvale, and a council that closes it for two years will hear about it every one of those months. That objection is real, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a promise that people will adjust.
The answer is that the two options do not preserve the same park. Option B reopens the loop but fences the shoreline path permanently, so the water becomes something residents look at through a barrier for the next thirty years. Option A closes everything for two years and then returns a lawn and an overlook on the tank roof, with no fence between a visitor and the space. The comparison is therefore not two years of loss set against seven months of loss, but two years of loss set against a permanent fence, and the permanent fence is the larger subtraction from how the park is actually used.
What Option A costs is real and should be stated plainly. It nearly doubles the capital cost, at $18,400,000 against $9,600,000, and the finance director has said the resulting rate increase would be larger in the first years. That matters in a period when combined water and sewer bills nationally rose about 24 percent from 2019 to 2024 and about 5.1 percent in 2025, faster than inflation, and Fairvale's rates have followed the same pattern. A household already absorbing those increases will feel this one. The argument for accepting it is that the same sheet shows Option A's added operating cost at about an eighth of Option B's every year for eighty years, and that a bill which rises once and then flattens is easier for a household to plan around than one that carries a permanent operating burden and a replacement project inside thirty years.
The council should authorize Option A, direct staff to phase construction so that at least part of Ashmead Park stays open during the closure, and publish the rate schedule before the vote rather than after it.
Rubric
| Criterion | Emerging | Developing | Proficient | Advanced |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claim and position | States a preference without naming a reason, or leaves the recommendation unclear. | Recommends an option and gives a general reason not tied to the option sheet. | Recommends an option in one clear sentence and names the strongest specific reason for it. | Recommends an option, names the strongest reason, and frames the decision so that the reader understands what is actually being chosen between. |
| Evidence and reasoning | Uses no figures from the option sheet, or misstates them. | Uses one figure, mostly restated rather than explained. | Uses at least two accurate figures and explains how each supports a reason. | Uses at least two accurate figures, explains each, and draws a comparison across figures that neither one shows alone. |
| Counterclaim and rebuttal | No counterclaim appears, or one appears only to be dismissed. | States an objection but answers it by repeating the claim. | States the strongest objection fairly and answers it with evidence. | States the strongest objection in its most convincing form, answers it with evidence, and reframes the comparison the objection assumed. |
| Naming the cost | Does not acknowledge any cost of the recommended option. | Mentions a cost in passing without evaluating it. | Names the specific cost of the recommendation and gives a reason it is worth accepting. | Names the cost with a figure, evaluates who bears it, and justifies it against a stated alternative. |
| Organization and conventions | Paragraphs do not follow a plan; frequent errors interrupt meaning. | Follows a plan loosely; errors are noticeable but meaning survives. | Follows the organizer's structure with clear transitions; errors are minor. | Structure serves the argument rather than a template, transitions carry logical weight, and conventions are consistently controlled. |
Differentiation
Support
Provide the organizer with the claim row and the first evidence row already filled in for one of the two options, so students begin from a model of the level of specificity expected. Allow the counterclaim and rebuttal rows to be drafted as a spoken exchange with a partner before writing, and reduce the length requirement to 500 to 600 words.
Extension
Ask students to write a second, shorter piece taking the opposite position, then a one-paragraph note identifying which piece of evidence was hardest to argue against and what a reader would need to know to settle the question. The note should say plainly whether writing both sides changed their own view.
ELL supports
Pre-teach "finished water," "capital cost," "operating cost," "service life," and "counterclaim" with a short definition and one everyday example for each, such as the difference between buying a car and paying for its fuel. Provide sentence frames for the counterclaim and rebuttal rows: "A reader might object that ___" and "That objection holds only if ___, and the option sheet shows ___."
Extensions
Have students present their recommendations in a mock council session with three-minute statements and a two-minute response round, then take a vote by secret ballot. Afterward, ask each student to write a short reflection identifying the single argument from the opposing side that came closest to changing their vote, and explaining why it did not.