Two women who were in high school during Hurricane Katrina are reflecting on how the kindness of a stranger helped make their prom feel like a normal school celebration.
Twenty years ago, the catastrophic hurricane claimed over 1,300 lives and displaced more than a million people across the Gulf Coast, including Ryan LeFrere, then a high school student.
When her senior prom came around nine months later, nearly 75% of her classmates at Cabrini High School had been affected by Katrina. “It was smaller,” LeFrere, now 37, tells PEOPLE of the celebration they managed to have. “Not too many people came back,” she says, but adds that it was still a “good time.”…