Project Grade 12 Health & Consumer Science
Reopening Kestrine High: A Building Water Safety Plan After Summer
A grade 12 health project where teams write a flushing, monitoring, and notice plan to cut Legionella and lead risk as a fictional school reopens after summer.
Objectives
- Students will explain how stagnant water in building plumbing loses its disinfectant and warms, conditions that let Legionella grow in biofilm and let lead dissolve from fixtures.
- Students will rank building fixtures by the health risk they pose after a shutdown, using how each fixture exposes people and who uses it.
- Students will write and present a flushing, monitoring, and communication plan that fits a fixed custodial time budget.
Vocabulary
Key words: Legionella, Legionnaires' disease, biofilm, stagnation, disinfectant residual, premise plumbing, flushing, aerosol
Teacher overview
Kestrine High, a fictional school, closes its main building for summer construction, and water sits almost untouched in its pipes for many weeks. Stagnant water in building plumbing loses its disinfectant, warms toward room temperature, and gives bacteria such as Legionella a chance to grow in the slimy biofilm that lines pipes and fixtures, while lead and copper have longer contact time to dissolve from older fittings. Legionnaires' disease is a serious pneumonia, and people usually catch it by breathing in fine droplets of contaminated water from showers, faucets, and similar fixtures rather than by drinking water in the ordinary way. Over five sessions, teams write a reopening water safety plan for one wing of the school and present it to the fictional facilities director and school nurse, who serve as the audience and ask follow-up questions.
The misconception to address early is that running each tap for a few seconds is enough. A useful plan moves the stale water out of every line, works outward from where water enters the building, includes hot water as well as cold, and keeps a record showing that each step was done. A second misconception is that drinking fountains are the only fixtures that matter. Showers, eyewash stations, and ice machines can matter more, because of how they deliver water to people. Assemble the source packet before Session 1 from public agency guidance on building reopening and water management, and remove any figures that conflict with one another so teams work from one consistent set.
Project Brief
Driving question: How should Kestrine High flush, check, and communicate about its water so that students and staff are protected on the first day back?
The situation. Kestrine High is a fictional high school. In our scenario, its main building was closed for ten weeks of summer construction, and almost no water was used. School opens again in eight days. The fictional facilities director has asked student teams to write the water safety plan for one wing each. The school nurse will review each plan before it is approved. Water enters the building at a meter room at the front of the Main Wing and travels outward to the other wings.
Your wing's fixtures. Each team is assigned one wing.
| Wing | Fixtures | Who uses them | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Main Wing | 10 drinking fountains, 2 bottle-filling stations, 14 classroom sinks, 1 nurse's office sink | All students and staff; students with health conditions in the nurse's office | Closest to the meter room; oldest part of the building, with original brass fittings |
| Science Wing | 8 lab sinks, 3 emergency eyewash stations, 1 emergency safety shower | Science students and teachers | Eyewash stations spray water into the eyes and face |
| Cafeteria Wing | 2 food prep sinks, 1 ice machine, 1 dishwasher, 4 drinking fountains | Kitchen staff and all students | Water goes into food, drinks, and ice |
| Athletics Wing | 12 locker room showers, 1 ice machine, 1 whirlpool tub in the training room, 2 drinking fountains | Athletes, coaches, and the athletic trainer | Farthest from the meter room; showers make fine spray |
Constraints.
- Time budget: the fictional facilities director can give each wing 12 staff-hours, which is 720 minutes, during the week before school opens. Your schedule must fit inside that total.
- Time per task, set by the fictional director for planning: flush and log a drinking fountain or bottle filler, 10 minutes; flush and log a sink, 8 minutes; flush and log a shower, 12 minutes; flush and log an eyewash station or safety shower, 10 minutes; empty, clean, and refill an ice machine, then throw out the first two batches of ice, 90 minutes; drain, clean, and refill the whirlpool tub, 120 minutes; run the dishwasher empty for two cycles, 30 minutes. A second full round of flushing on reopening morning counts against the same budget.
- Order: flush from the point closest to the meter room outward to the farthest fixture, so that fresh water pushes stale water ahead of it.
- Hot and cold: both the hot and the cold side of each fixture must be flushed. Your plan must include a step that checks the water heater settings with the facilities staff.
- Checks: your plan must include at least one check a custodian can actually do at a fixture, such as a disinfectant test strip reading compared with a reading taken at the meter room, or a temperature reading. It must also say what happens if a check fails.
- Communication: your plan must include a one-page notice for custodial staff and a short message to families that a parent can read in about two minutes.
What you turn in. A written plan with five parts: a hazard summary with sources, a ranked fixture table, a flushing schedule that shows total minutes, a monitoring log with rules for failed checks, and the two notices. Your team also gives a six-minute briefing to the facilities director and the nurse, who may be played by the teacher and a guest.
Milestones
- Session 1: Hazards and sources. Read the source packet. Record, with a source for each, how stagnation affects the disinfectant, the temperature, biofilm, and lead. Explain how Legionella reaches the lungs and why showers and eyewash stations matter. Output: a one-page hazard summary with at least four cited sources.
- Session 2: Rank your fixtures. Rank every fixture type in your wing from highest to lowest health risk after the shutdown. For each, name how it exposes people (breathing spray, drinking, food or ice, eye contact) and who uses it. Output: a ranked table with a one-sentence reason for each rank.
- Session 3: Flushing order and schedule. Put your fixtures in order from nearest the meter room to farthest. Build a day-by-day schedule for the week before opening, and total the minutes to show it fits inside 720. If it does not fit, decide what to cut or move and explain the tradeoff. Output: a schedule with a clearly shown time total.
- Session 4: Checks, failed-check rules, and notices. Design a monitoring log with a row for each fixture, the date, the person, the check result, and the action taken. Write a rule for what happens when a check fails, such as flushing again, taking the fixture out of service, and calling the director. Draft the staff notice and the family message. Output: log template, failed-check rules, and two draft notices.
- Session 5: Briefing. Present your plan to the facilities director and the nurse, then answer their questions. Revise the plan based on their feedback. Output: the final written plan and the briefing.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Health reasoning | Hazards are listed without explaining how stagnation causes them or how people are exposed. | Explains stagnation hazards in general but does not connect them to the wing's fixtures. | Explains how lost disinfectant, warmth, and biofilm raise Legionella and lead risk, and ranks fixtures by exposure route and user, citing sources. | Does all of the proficient work and explains why a specific fixture, such as an eyewash station or shower, outranks the drinking fountains, with sources that agree. |
| Plan feasibility | Schedule is missing or ignores the order and the 720-minute budget. | Schedule follows the order but the time total is missing, wrong, or over budget. | Schedule works outward from the meter room, covers hot and cold sides, and totals 720 minutes or less with the math shown. | Schedule fits the budget and explains a deliberate tradeoff, such as holding a low-risk fixture out of service to make time for a second flush of a high-risk one. |
| Monitoring and failed checks | No check is included, or the check is not something a custodian can do. | A check is included but there is no rule for a failed result. | A practical check is logged for each fixture, with a clear rule for what happens when a check fails. | The log and rules would let someone who missed the meeting pick up the plan and act correctly on a failed check. |
| Communication | Notices are missing or use technical terms without explanation. | Notices are present but unclear about what staff or families should do. | The staff notice gives clear steps, and the family message explains the risk and the school's actions in plain language. | Both notices are clear and accurate, and the briefing answers the nurse's and director's questions with evidence from the plan. |
Differentiation
Support
Give teams a partly filled ranked-fixture table with the exposure route already listed for each fixture type, and a schedule template with the task times printed in each row so the team only has to order the fixtures and add the minutes. Offer a notice template with headings for "What happened," "What we are doing," and "What you should do."
Extension
Ask teams to add a second-year section to the plan: which parts of the building are likely to have low water use during a normal school year, such as a rarely used locker room or a closed wing, and what routine flushing schedule would keep those areas from becoming a problem again. Teams should justify the frequency they choose from the source packet.
ELL supports
Pre-teach "stagnant," "flush," "biofilm," "spray," "log," and "fixture" with a labeled diagram of the building showing the meter room and the direction water travels. Allow teams to write the family message first in the home language most common in the class and then in English, since school notices often go out in both. Provide the briefing frame "Our highest-risk fixture is ___ because ___. We will ___ before opening day."
Extensions
Invite the school's actual facilities or maintenance lead to hear the final briefings and describe what the district does when buildings reopen after a long break. Students can compare the district's steps with their own plans and write a short reflection on one thing they would change.