If you ask any Wyoming parent why they decided to move to this small suburb, their answer is always the same: “the schools.” As boasted on the Wyoming City Schools website, Wyoming High School students have a 98% graduation rate and earned over 16.2 million dollars in merit aid in 2020. Segregation has been a lightning rod in American politics for the past seventy years - and Cincinnati is no exception. As Karl and Alma Taeuber, professors of sociology at University of Wisconsin-Madison, write, residential segregation “inhibits the development of informal, neighborly relations” and holds “serious implications for the present and future mobility opportunities” of residents (qtd.

When we played them in sports, okay, let’s go beat the rich kids.” The narrative in Wyoming has always mirrored this: kids joking about getting “shot up” in Lockland or warning against driving through the neighborhood at night. They stay on their side of the tracks and we stay on ours. He reminisced about his childhood growing up in Lockland, remarking, “Across the tracks, they all live in mansions. Devoid of trees and green grass, the streets are absent of passersby.Īdam Raby, current principal of Lockland junior and senior high schools, recently spoke to me about the harsh realities that his 174 high school students are forced to reckon with every day. Just one block later, my tires bump over the metal of a railroad track, and I enter the community of Lockland.

As I continue south, houses merge into storefronts of small boutiques, a bakery, a dentist office. The sunlight dapples across my sunroof as I drive through my hometown of Wyoming, Ohio picturesque houses with lush front yards hide behind tall maples as I cruise past dog-walkers down Wyoming Avenue.