An untold number of kids—probably numbering in the tens of thousands—missed weeks, months, even years of school after Katrina. Only now, a decade later, are advocates and researchers beginning to grasp the lasting effects of this post-storm duress. Increasingly, they believe the same lower-income teens who waded through the city’s floodwaters and spent several rootless years afterward may now be helping drive a surging need for GED programs and entry-level job-training programs in the city. It’s no coincidence, they say, that Louisiana has the nation’s highest rate of young adults not in school or working.

Many of the Americans who today lack both jobs and diplomas may have been Katrina-era adolescents, who often suffered such high levels of trauma and instability that learning became nearly impossible. It was "like throwing seeds at cement," said Lisa Celeste Green-Derry, a New Orleans-based education researcher.

A decade ago, the Lees’ mother hadn’t anticipated that her sons would lose an entire school year. The circumstances seemed temporary, just a stopover until New Orleans cleaned and re-opened housing and schools. Then, three months after Katrina, the state of Louisiana announced a complete reconfiguration of New Orleans’ notorious public schools in what then-Governor Kathleen Blanco called "the opportunity of a lifetime."

In justifying the state takeover of the schools, which would later be handed over to charter-school operators, Blanco assumed that most evacuee children had transferred to superior schools outside of New Orleans. "Parents have new expectations for what schools should be and what they should provide," she said at a presentation announcing the legislation, just a few months after Katrina. "These families will only return home when we can meet these new, and higher, expectations."

Few imagined that the education of so many evacuee children would be disrupted for so long.

About half of Katrina evacuees were said to have hailed from badly devastated New Orleans, many from flood-prone, high-poverty neighborhoods. Most children had attended the city’s public schools, notorious for dilapidated buildings and classes from which fewer than half the students graduated. While some displaced children thrived in better schooling elsewhere, countless others didn’t have an opportunity to settle down: Many low-income New Orleans evacuees spent several years after the storm in nomadic exile, moving among family members’ residences or in search of jobs or housing.

Early on, children’s advocates noted that serial moves and school absences were prevalent. A 2006 study by the Children’s Health Fund and the National Center for Disaster Preparedness, part of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, warned that 20 percent of displaced children were either not enrolled in school or not attending regularly, missing an average of 10 days a month. The families interviewed for the Mailman study had moved an average of 3.5 times by six months after the storm, with some moving as many as nine times. Not surprisingly, evacuee children couldn’t keep up with their studies. Four and a half years later, Mailman researchers found that more than one-third of Katrina’s displaced children were at least one year behind in school for their age.

While disasters are sometimes portrayed as events affecting everyone equally, children from more fragile families are more likely to be traumatized and to recover more slowly, said Lori Peek, a sociologist who co-directs the Center for Disaster and Risk Analysis at Colorado State University. After observing 650 displaced New Orleans-area children, Peek and her collaborator Alice Fothergill found that poorer children were more likely to be exposed to Katrina’s floodwaters, resulting in "challenges concentrating in schools, higher anxiety levels, and more behavioral problems."