Well, here we are three weeks into the school year — and no one is quite sure where the former Horace Mann students are supposed to be getting their education.

It’s just like the Gary School Board to be fashionably late formulating a policy that affects the lives of hundreds of students and dozens of athletes and their families — especially when they’ve known for several months that this issue was looming.

Which brings us to the case of Daphne Buie.

Buie was a teammate of Shanee Butler’s at Mann last year. Butler was a star point guard for Mann. After a two-week stint at Roosevelt, now she’s now enrolled at West Side, the school that just happens to possess the best girls basketball team in Gary. She left Roosevelt last week because she believes it’s possible the school board will enact a policy that forces Mann students to attend the school district in which they live — and she lives just three blocks from West Side.

Buie lives on the city’s east side, closer to Roosevelt than Wirt.

At some point, with the closing of Mann last year, Buie and her mother Daphne Pheal believe she now lives in the Wirt school district, though even this fact can’t be confirmed.

But Buie, like hundreds of former Mann students and athletes, was under the impression that students at Mann could enroll in any school in the city after the school closed this summer.

So, Buie chose Roosevelt because her mother wanted her to go there.

“I was supposed to play at Wirt but you gotta listen to your mom,” Buie said.

Pheal said she wanted her daughter to go to Roosevelt because she’s has asthma and she figured she’d be closer to her if she had a problem.

“If I was working at that end (of town), it would be easier to pick her up,” said Pheal, who is unemployed.

Sounds reasonable enough. Except one problem.

Apparently, as far as anyone in the Gary school district can tell the Post-Tribune, there was never an open enrollment policy.

This means that numerous students — not just athletes — could be affected by new boundary lines for schools.

That means the unthinkable could happen.

Dozens of kids, who already enrolled in schools outside the district they live in, will have to change schools in the middle of the year.

It seems inconceivable that the board — and Gary administrators — could even consider that possibility, right?

For now, Buie is happy at Roosevelt, where she’s adjusted well to the new school, a new set of classmates and new routine.

No one has pulled her aside and told her that her days are limited at Roosevelt.

“No one has talked to me or anything. Hopefully, I’ll be able to stay at Roosevelt. It took me a long time to get here,” Buie said.

In the meantime, we’re all waiting for a news release, a phone call, some official announcement from somebody who matters that articulates what the policy is regarding former Mann students — and the schools they should attend.

Reporter Mike Hutton

can be reached at 648-3139