Writing prompt Grade 10 Social Studies & Civics
Should Tarnley Township Approve the Data Center Wells?
A grade 10 argument prompt on a fictional township's vote on a data center's groundwater agreement, with drawdown and tax data, an exemplar, and a rubric.
Objectives
- Students will write an argument that states a claim about the water agreement and supports it with evidence.
- Students will address a counterclaim about jobs and tax revenue with a specific rebuttal.
- Students will explain how drawdown from new wells affects existing well owners nearby.
Vocabulary
- Aquifer
- An aquifer is an underground layer of rock, sand, or gravel that holds water in the tiny spaces between its grains. Wells reach down into aquifers to bring water up to the surface.
- Drawdown
- Drawdown is how far the water level in a well drops when a pump pulls water out. The harder and longer you pump, the bigger the drawdown gets.
Also: withdrawal permit, evaporative cooling, closed-loop cooling, tax abatement, counterclaim
Teacher overview
Students write an argument essay to a township board that must vote on a water agreement for a large data center, using a background packet of local hydrology, budget, and employment figures. The question is genuinely open, since the project would pay for services the township cannot otherwise afford while drawing from the same aquifer that supplies its neighbors' wells. Teachers should surface one misconception during planning: students often treat groundwater as a stored volume that only matters when it runs out, so a single large user looks harmless above a big aquifer. Pumping lowers the water table around the well first, which means shallow neighboring wells can go dry while the aquifer as a whole still holds a great deal of water.
Prompt
Background. Tarnley Township is a fictional community of about 6,800 people. Its public water system serves 2,100 homes from three wells in the Lockspur Aquifer. Farms, a small bottling plant, and about 900 households on private wells draw from the same aquifer. A county monitoring well shows that the water table has fallen about 4 feet over the past 12 years, which the county attributes to dry summers and irrigation.
Rowanmede Data Systems has asked the township to approve a water agreement for a computing campus on 90 acres of former farmland. The figures below come from the company's application and the township's own consultants in this fictional scenario.
| Item | Figure in the application |
|---|---|
| Water use, summer peak | Up to 250,000 gallons per day for evaporative cooling |
| Water use, winter | About 90,000 gallons per day |
| Wells | Two new production wells on the company's own land |
| Permanent jobs | 45, most of them technical, plus about 400 construction jobs for two years |
| Property taxes during a 10-year abatement | About $760,000 a year |
| Property taxes after the abatement | About $1.9 million a year |
| Township annual budget today | About $4.3 million |
| Consultant's drawdown model | An additional 3 to 6 feet within a half mile of the new wells |
| Private wells within that half mile | 62, of which 19 are older and only 60 to 80 feet deep |
| Closed-loop cooling alternative | Uses very little water, adds about $14 million to construction, and raises electricity costs |
For scale, the average US household uses about 300 gallons of water per day, so the summer peak in the application is close to the daily use of 830 households. The township board can approve the agreement as filed, approve it with written conditions, or reject it. Conditions the board has used before include metered monthly reporting, a fund that pays to deepen or replace a neighbor's well if it fails, and limits on pumping during a declared drought.
Your task. Write an argument essay addressed to the Tarnley Township board that answers this question: should the board approve the water agreement as filed, approve it with conditions, or reject it? State a clear claim, support it with at least three pieces of evidence from the background, address the strongest argument against your position, and close with the specific action you want the board to take. Write four to six paragraphs. Use only the background provided.
Planning Organizer
Fill in every row before drafting. Each row matches a line on the rubric, so a complete organizer contains everything the essay will be scored on.
| Section | What to write | My notes |
|---|---|---|
| Claim | One sentence naming what the board should do: approve as filed, approve with conditions, or reject. | |
| Evidence 1 | A figure or fact from the background, plus one sentence on what it shows. | |
| Evidence 2 | A second figure or fact, from a different row of the table than Evidence 1. | |
| Evidence 3 | A third figure or fact, plus one sentence connecting it to your claim. | |
| Counterclaim | The strongest point someone on the other side would make, stated fairly and in their words. | |
| Rebuttal | Why your claim still holds, using at least one piece of evidence the counterclaim does not answer. | |
| Conclusion | The exact action you want the board to take, including any conditions you would attach. |
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 Tarnley Township board should approve the Rowanmede water agreement, but only with written conditions on cooling, reporting, and neighboring wells. The project is worth having, though the application as filed puts too much of its risk on people who never signed it.
The strongest reason for conditions is what the drawdown model predicts. The township's consultant expects an additional 3 to 6 feet of decline within a half mile of the new wells, and 62 private wells sit inside that circle. Nineteen of them are only 60 to 80 feet deep. The water table in this fictional township has already fallen about 4 feet in 12 years without the campus, so the new wells would add to a decline that is underway rather than start one. A homeowner whose well runs dry in August cannot wait for a study.
The second reason is that the company has a workable alternative. Closed-loop cooling would use very little water, and the application says it would add about $14 million to construction along with higher electricity costs. That is a real expense, yet the company chose evaporative cooling because water here is cheap, not because closed-loop cooling would not work. A condition requiring closed-loop cooling during the summer peak moves that cost back to the party creating the risk.
The third reason is that conditions cost the township almost nothing to write. Metered monthly reporting and a well-replacement fund would give the board information and a remedy it does not otherwise have. Without those terms, a neighbor with a failed well would have to prove in court that the campus caused it.
Supporters of approving the agreement as filed argue that the township needs the money. They are right about the size of it, since taxes would run about $760,000 a year during the abatement and about $1.9 million after it, against a township budget of about $4.3 million today. Forty-five permanent jobs matter in a community of 6,800 people. That argument, however, assumes the company would walk away over conditions. A firm willing to spend on this scale is unlikely to abandon a prepared site over reporting requirements and a well fund, and the board can offer to phase in the cooling requirement to keep the project on schedule.
The board should therefore approve the agreement with three conditions: closed-loop cooling for the summer peak, metered monthly reporting to the township, and a funded guarantee that pays to deepen or replace any private well within a half mile that fails after pumping begins. That vote keeps the revenue and moves the risk to the party best able to carry it.
Rubric
| Criterion | Emerging | Developing | Proficient | Advanced |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claim | No clear position on the board's vote | Names a position but shifts or restates it inconsistently | States one clear position and holds it throughout the essay | States a precise position, including the conditions attached, and sustains it in every paragraph |
| Evidence and reasoning | Uses no figures from the background | Uses one figure, with little explanation | Uses at least three figures from different rows and explains what each shows | Uses at least three figures, explains each, and connects them to one another to build a single line of reasoning |
| Counterclaim and rebuttal | No counterclaim appears | Mentions the other side without answering it | States the counterclaim fairly and answers it with evidence | States the counterclaim in its strongest form, concedes what is true in it, and answers it with evidence it does not address |
| Organization and conventions | Paragraphs are unordered and errors interrupt meaning | Some structure, with errors that distract the reader | Clear order from claim to evidence to conclusion, with few errors | Deliberate order with transitions that carry the argument, and control of conventions throughout |
Differentiation
Support
Give these students the claim options as three written sentences to choose from, and highlight four rows of the fictional data table as the pool their evidence must come from. Provide sentence frames for the counterclaim paragraph, such as "Supporters of the agreement argue that ___, and they are right that ___. Even so, ___." Allow a four-paragraph essay with one piece of evidence per body paragraph.
Extension
Ask these students to write the essay as the neighboring county's response instead, arguing what the county should require if the campus is built just across the township line, where the township's conditions would not apply. This requires them to reason about who has authority over a well that draws from an aquifer shared across a boundary.
ELL supports
Pre-teach aquifer, drawdown, abatement, evaporative cooling, and counterclaim with a labeled cross-section showing a pumping well, a lowered water table, and a shallow neighboring well. Allow students to plan in their first language and draft in English, and accept a bulleted organizer with short phrases rather than full sentences.
Extensions
Students can hold a mock board meeting in which four writers with different claims give two-minute statements and then answer questions from classmates acting as residents, farmers, and company representatives. Another option is a research task on how their own state issues large water withdrawal permits, and whether a neighboring well owner has any legal protection when a new high-volume well begins pumping.