NEW ORLEANS - An 8-year-old girl slams the front door of her family's trailer every time it rains to keep imagined floodwaters out. A 12-year-old girl prefers the heat outside to life inside her "little compact box," a FEMA trailer. A 17-year-old boy looks down his once-crowded street and sees nothing but empty homes.

For these children and thousands of others, the new school year in New Orleans comes as the nation marks the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina - a natural disaster that has markedly changed their city and their lives.

While lessons of loss are often a part of growing up, the children of Hurricane Katrina have coped collectively with unimaginable loss - and their struggles are far from over.

Their parents fight to keep jobs. Their homes are destroyed. There are fewer kids in the city - less than half the public schools needed before the storm are reopening. The routines that provided comfort have evaporated, and that instability could have long-term effects.

"Kids do better with routine and structure, and that's something that many of these parents can't provide," said Mary Lou Kelley, a psychology professor at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge who is conducting a two-year study of the emotional effects of Katrina on youth. "How do you have a bedtime routine when each day is so different? How do you do anything that we know to be important?"

Many parents are trying to maintain some sort of normalcy. And some youths say there are upsides: Closer relationships with family members, new responsibilities, a maturity they didn't know they could possess. They want to be in New Orleans, their home. They want to help rebuild.

Here are four stories from the storm:

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Boredom in the box:

Lashonda Hayes quietly plays a portable video game in her FEMA trailer, stacks of bottled water at her feet.

Her mother and sister sleep in the bunk bed cubbyholes in the back, her grandmother in the trailer's one bedroom in the front. The plump 12-year-old sleeps on a pullout bed that doubles as the trailer's couch. She spends as much time as she can outside the home, which she dubbed the "little compact box."

When the storm came, Lashonda and her extended family evacuated their low-lying Ninth Ward home to Texas. The good-natured, bright sixth-grader, who was at the top of her class in New Orleans, made friends easily at the different schools she attended. Still, she longed for her old neighborhood.

"It just wasn't home there," she said. "The people were different, they talked different. I just wanted to be here."

When the family returned, they found they'd lost everything, including Lashonda's collection of stuffed animals. A spray-painted red sign on their front porch told them a white man and a cat had been found dead inside in October. They don't know who he was, or how he died.

There are few kids around for Lashonda to play with and she finds the stillness of the neighborhood unnerving.

On Valentine's Day, her mother gave her a new stuffed animal, a start to a new collection. Space being as it is, the gift is in storage.

Soon Lashonda will go to a new school, across the canal, in the Upper Ninth Ward. She's looking forward to it. She won't have any friends there, but a few cousins might go. Still, she worries.

"I don't think life will ever be the same, no matter how hard they work," she said. "I don't want another storm to come and take everything away."

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Maturity in New Orleans East:

Sydney Holmes walks up the front steps of her old home and waits while her mother looks for the key. Behind her, a large white trailer sits in the hot afternoon sun.

Sydney's mom is trying to get the trailer off their lawn. FEMA never delivered a key, so the trailer sat unused while the 12-year-old and her parents moved into an apartment on the other side of New Orleans, in suburban Metairie.

Mother and daughter walk through the stripped-down house, which Sydney and her parents gutted on their own. Sydney points out her old room, now just studs and a cement floor.

"I left everything in there," she says. Her clothes, her pictures, her favorite giraffe stuffed animal. Gone.

A student at a prestigious Uptown school and a wannabe actress, Sydney was not used to going without.

"I was a princess," she admitted sheepishly, her almond-shaped eyes lowered to the ground. She stares at her scuffed white tennis shoes, survivors of the storm. "I was used to getting what I wanted when I asked for it."

Her parents, both postal workers, found their insurance didn't cover what it would take to rebuild. Though her mother tried to hide it, Sydney remembers listening to her mother shout at insurance adjusters on the phone in the next room.

Sydney stopped asking for things. She helped her parents reslate their roof, and only complained a few times about the hard work.

"I realized it wasn't all about me anymore," she said.

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Renewal in Lakeview:

Patrick Stoudt and his twin brother, William, 17, planned this day for weeks. On a recent Saturday, the brothers, along with the organization Youth Rebuilding New Orleans, lead a group of about 250 teens around the middle-class Lakeview area to cut grass, pick up debris, gut homes and clean up their neighborhood.

The Stoudt brothers know they are better off than many. The first floor of their home flooded, ruining many possessions. But their father's business hasn't slowed, and the family can afford to return and rebuild.

"We realized it had to start with us," William Stoudt said recently, sitting in his family's home, talking about the neighborhood's cleanup. "Part of it is our responsibility."

The Stoudts have spent many weekends this summer gutting. The work is grueling, but fills up the slow summer days. The teachers and friends and neighbors they've helped sometimes come to assist and look for what they can salvage. Others don't.

"A lot of them have moved on," Patrick Stoudt says. "They don't want to see it. They tell us just to get rid of everything."

The brothers are now looking to the new school year and to college beyond that. Their neighborhood will be rebuilt, they say, but it will take time.

"If we go through this storm season without any storms, in five years, we'll be OK," Patrick Stoudt says.

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Hope in St. Bernard:

The girls spread out on the old tennis courts, stretching and shouting and giggling as their parents watch in canvas chairs. Behind them, rows of mud-stained, gutted homes sit unnoticed.

Jessica Brown is most like her old self here, where she and a few teens teach simple cheers to a group of about 60 girls, a new parish cheerleading group called the St. Bernard Dominators.

When she was at Trist Middle School in St. Bernard Parish just east of New Orleans' Ninth Ward, Jessica dreamed of becoming captain of her dance team, or maybe just an officer. But then came Katrina, and there was no Trist anymore.

For Jessica, the six days after the storm that she waited to hear if her stepfather, a St. Bernard Parish sheriff's deputy, was alive or dead were the worst. When her family evacuated, her stepfather had to stay behind.

"I didn't know if he was hurt or dead or helping people or anything," the 13-year-old recalled.

He was OK. Their home was not.

The storm took most of the family's possessions, and their dog and cat. Her mother, Vanessa, salvaged the teen's prized dance team outfit, a black and white stretch leotard. But it was too damaged to go anywhere except a keepsake box.

Jessica now spends most days at a new school or inside the family's extended trailer, which sits among dozens of others near a defunct aluminum plant.

When it rains, Jessica's little sister Alexis, 8, runs to the home's front door and slams it shut. She's afraid of the water.

Jessica tries to be a good role model for Alexis. When she gets sad, Jessica goes to her room and turns on the radio. She makes up a new dance routine. Soon, she'll try out for her new school's dance team.

She dreams again about becoming a captain.

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