PASS CHRISTIAN, Miss. – Wearing a canary yellow strapless evening gown, Jessica Jenkins walked across the remains of her home, raising her petticoat to keep it out of the red clay.

Prom season holds a special importance for Jenkins and other Gulf Coast students whose last year of high school was defined by Hurricane Katrina.

“The littlest things get to you now,” said Jenkins, who was named the prom queen Saturday. “Things that you would never have thought would bother you before the storm, bother you now.”

Next to the site of her old home, where their new house is under construction, Jenkins and older sister Leah share a trailer supplied by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Her parents and younger sister Brett live in an adjacent trailer. At one time, they all shared one trailer, with a white maltese and golden haired poodle.

“You have a lot of rough mornings trying to get ready in a FEMA trailer,” she said.

Before Saturday’s prom, she had to apply her makeup in the trailer’s dim lighting while a bulldozer cleared debris from a nearby lot.

She and her classmates from Pass Christian High have been attending school in portable classrooms set up on the campus of the local elementary school. Enrollment was down from 600 students last year to 420.

Other senior classes from Pass Christian have had their proms at a venue in downtown Gulfport but it, too, was damaged by the storm, so Saturday’s party for the Class of 2006 was moved to the Orange Grove Community Center off scenic U.S. 49, next to the Kangaroo Gas Station.

Senior Ryan Spear was shocked the school could hold a prom at all, much less have it ready on time.

“It isn’t bittersweet. It’s just sweet,” senior Heidi Knight said.