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Lesson plan Grade 11 Social Studies & Civics

Sewer Lines and City Limits: A Sunderby County Service Lesson

A grade 11 civics lesson using four invented county documents from 1961 to 2021 to explain why neighborhoods outside a fictional city never got piped sewer service.

Objectives

  1. Students will explain how a city's control of sewer extension gave it leverage over land outside its boundaries.
  2. Students will trace one physical consequence of septic failure back to a governance decision made decades earlier.
  3. Students will compare three methods residents used across sixty years to press a claim for public service.

Vocabulary

Septic system
A septic system is a small, private wastewater treatment setup buried in the yard of a home that is not connected to city sewers. A tank settles the solids, and the soil in the yard filters the water.
Special district
A local government created to do one job, such as delivering water. It has its own board and its own budget, separate from the city or county.
Capital improvement plan
A utility's long-term to-do list of big construction projects, such as replacing old pipes or building new tanks. It shows what will be built, when, and how it will be paid for.

Also: annexation, unincorporated, extraterritorial, service extension

Teacher overview

Metropolitan areas grew fastest just outside city limits after the Second World War, and the cities that owned the sewer mains decided which of those neighborhoods got connected. Extension usually came bundled with annexation, so a settlement that could not be annexed on the city's terms often waited generations for a pipe. This lesson works through four invented documents from Sunderby County, a fictional county whose seat is the small city of Draypool, and asks students to follow one settlement from a 1961 petition to a 2021 state grant program. Students frequently assume that a house without sewer service simply lies too far out for the pipe to reach, when distance is often the least important factor and the boundary decision is the one that mattered.

Procedure

Hook, 5 minutes. Project a plain description of two neighborhoods that are one mile apart. One is inside a city and has sewer service. The other is outside and has septic tanks. Ask students to list every reason they can think of for the difference. Record the list without correcting it, and return to it in the closure.

Document analysis, 20 minutes. Distribute the four invented documents. Students annotate each one for who is speaking, what is being asked, and who has the power to grant it. All four were written for this lesson and describe the fictional county of Sunderby.

Document A, minutes of the Sunderby County Board of Supervisors, June 1961: "A petition of one hundred forty residents of the Larksedge settlement was received, asking that the county request sewer service from the city of Draypool. The chairman observed that the county operates no sewer system and holds no power to compel the city to extend one. The petition was received and filed."

Document B, Resolution 61-14 of the city of Draypool, September 1961: "No sanitary sewer main shall be extended beyond the corporate limits except where the tract to be served has first petitioned for annexation, has been found by the city engineer to be capable of paying the full cost of the extension by special assessment, and lies within an area the city has designated for future growth."

Document C, letter from the Larksedge Residents Association to the state department of health, March 2016: "Our neighborhood was platted in 1949 on heavy clay with a seasonal high water table. More than half of our septic fields now surface after a wet week. Several households draw drinking water from shallow wells within one hundred feet of a failing field. Draypool has annexed land on three sides of us since 1961 and has twice declined to consider us."

Document D, summary of the state's Unserved Communities Water and Sewer Program, 2021: "Grants are available to counties, cities, and nonprofit water associations to design and construct water and sewer service for residential areas that have gone without it. Applicants must document the age of the settlement, the condition of existing on-site systems, and the reason service was not extended earlier. Priority is given to applications that include a signed service agreement with an existing utility."

Structured discussion, 15 minutes. Build a four-column timeline on chart paper with a column for each document. For each, students supply the means residents used, the body with authority to act, and the outcome. Then ask the central question: what changed between 1961 and 2021 that made a claim which the county board could only receive and file into one a state agency would fund. Look for answers that name the shift in which level of government held both the money and the responsibility.

Handout work, 12 minutes. Students complete the eight handout items individually. Circulate and check that students distinguish what Resolution 61-14 required from what it merely permitted.

Closure and exit ticket, 8 minutes. Return to the hook list and ask students to cross out any reason the documents did not support. Collect an exit ticket naming the single sentence in Resolution 61-14 that did the most to keep Larksedge unserved, with one sentence of justification.

Sewer Lines and City Limits: A Sunderby County Service Lesson — Grade 11 Social Studies & Civics
Name: ____________________________ Date: ______________

Student Handout

Sunderby County, the city of Draypool, and the Larksedge settlement are fictional, and all four documents were written for this lesson.

  1. According to Document A, what did the county board say about its own power to extend sewer service, and what did it do with the petition?
  2. Document B lists three conditions a tract had to satisfy before Draypool would extend a sewer main. Name all three.
  3. Which of the three conditions in Document B would have been hardest for the Larksedge settlement to satisfy, and why? Use a detail from Document C in your answer.
  4. Document C describes clay soil, a seasonal high water table, and shallow wells. Explain in two or three sentences how those three physical conditions act on one another once a septic field fails.
  5. Explain how a decision about the city boundary made in 1961 produced a drinking water problem described in 2016.
  6. Compare the means residents used in Document A with the means used in Document C. Name one advantage the 2016 approach had that the 1961 petition did not.
  7. Document D gives priority to applications that include a signed service agreement with an existing utility. Explain why that requirement could still leave Larksedge dependent on a decision by Draypool.
  8. Supporters of Resolution 61-14 would call it a reasonable way to protect city ratepayers from paying for growth outside the city. Critics would call it a way of choosing who joins the city. Take one position and defend it in three or four sentences using the documents.

From Water for Schools (waterforschools.org). This material is in the public domain (CC0) and may be copied, edited, and shared freely.

Answer Key
  1. Answer: The board said the county operates no sewer system and cannot compel Draypool to extend one, and it received and filed the petition without action. Document A states both points directly.
  2. Answer: A petition for annexation, a finding by the city engineer that the tract can pay the full extension cost by special assessment, and location inside an area the city designated for future growth.
  3. Answer: Accept either the growth-area condition or the assessment condition, defended with evidence. The strongest answer names the growth-area designation, since Document C reports that Draypool annexed land on three sides of Larksedge while twice declining to consider the settlement itself, which suggests the city never designated it.
  4. Answer: Clay drains slowly and a high water table leaves little unsaturated soil, so effluent surfaces instead of filtering, and surface water carrying that effluent can reach a shallow well within a hundred feet. Accept any answer linking poor drainage to surfacing effluent to well contamination. Also accept the subsurface path: with a high water table, effluent reaches shallow groundwater with little soil to filter it, and a shallow well within a hundred feet draws from that groundwater.
  5. Answer: Resolution 61-14 tied sewer extension to annexation and to a growth designation Larksedge never received, so the settlement stayed on septic systems that its soils could not support, and the failing systems then threatened the shallow wells residents drink from.
  6. Answer: The 1961 petition went to a county board with no sewer authority and no money, while the 2016 letter went to a state agency with regulatory authority over on-site systems and a role in funding. Accept any answer identifying the shift to a body that could actually act.
  7. Answer: Because the program prefers applications backed by a utility willing to serve the area, and the nearest utility is Draypool, the city retains an effective veto over whether the grant application is competitive.
  8. Answer: Accept either position when it is supported. A defense of the resolution cites the special assessment requirement as protection for existing ratepayers. A criticism cites the growth-area condition, which rests on city discretion rather than on cost, and the pattern of annexation on three sides described in Document C.

Differentiation

Support

Give these students the documents with the operative sentence in each one already underlined, and reduce item 2 to identifying two of the three conditions. Provide a partially completed timeline with the 1961 column filled in as a model before the discussion begins.

Extension

Ask these students to draft a two-paragraph amendment to Resolution 61-14 that keeps the protection for existing ratepayers while removing the city's discretion over which settlements qualify, then to name one group that would object to the amendment and why.

ELL supports

Pre-teach annexation, corporate limits, septic field, and special assessment with a simple labeled map showing a city boundary, an unincorporated settlement, and a sewer main that stops at the line. Provide sentence frames for items 5 and 8: "The 1961 decision led to the 2016 problem because ___," and "I agree with this view because Document ___ shows ___."

Extensions

Have students look up whether their own address, or the school's, is inside or outside a municipal boundary and which utility is responsible for water and sewer service there, using the county assessor's public parcel viewer or the utility's service area map. Students then write a paragraph describing what would have to happen for a nearby unserved parcel to be connected.