This story about the Katrina to COVID Class was produced as part of the series Critical Condition: The Students the Pandemic Hit Hardest , reported by HuffPost and The Hechinger Report , a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

Satoriya Lambert was still a toddler when Hurricane Katrina struck her hometown. After the levees burst open, her family carried Satoriya to a waiting car on higher ground and they fled the flooded city.

Satoriya is now 18. Last month, because of coronavirus restrictions, she was allowed to bring exactly three family members to her 15-minute, individualized graduation ceremony from Walter L. Cohen College Prep.

All across the nation, students with senior years truncated by the pandemic are feeling a sense of loss as they try to understand what exactly it means to be part of the Class of 2020. But in New Orleans, some have dubbed this years graduates the Katrina to COVID Class, because their academic careers are book-ended by Hurricane Katrina and the pandemic.

These students trace their earliest memories to 2005. Satoriya, who had just turned 3, remembers looking out the car window to see downed trees and so much water everywhere.

The family house that Satoriya lives in now had water to the ceiling. Memories of the disaster are particularly vivid in graduates, like Satoriya, from the citys Black households, whose homes were far more likely to be in the low-lying, heavily flooded areas of New Orleans due to historic patterns of discrimination and segregation.

Jarrin Rainey, 20, a 2020 graduate of Frederick A. Douglass High School , remembers his uncles pushing the family to safety in a boat. All he could see for miles was dirty, nasty water and ruined, flooded houses, he said.

Mental-health experts say that because of Katrina, those in the Class of 2020 in New Orleans are likely to be more affected by coronavirus upheaval. We know this is true, though theyre not going to be able to make that connection Oh, Im feeling this way about COVID because, you know, early in my life these other things happened, said Denese Shervington, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Tulane University School of Medicine who focuses on community wellness as CEO of the Institute for Women and Ethnic Studies , the nonprofit she founded 27 years ago.

In interviews for this story, some of this years graduates described feeling a constant sense of internal struggle. This, too, could be a legacy of Katrina, which affected the way their young brains formed and how their bodies react to stress, Shervington said. They are going to have memories in their bodies reacting to things they felt or heard or maybe observed, if their parents were in a state of despair.

Class of 2020 graduate Trevianne Turner, 18, feels a certain tug inside when she looks at the Katrina blight left near her school, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. High School in the citys Lower 9th Ward. Sometimes I walk or ride by rundown houses or empty lots filled with weeds and I think, Theres a history back there. What would it have been like without Katrina?

That question is personal. Beyond the storms visible scars on New Orleans, Trevianne associates it with a series of losses that took a more invisible, internal toll on her life. My Katrina is different, she said.