SOUTH POINT — For those South Point High students who spent their lunch hour listening to President Barack Obama, it was a speech that resonated with their own goals, they said.

The speech that was broadcast nationwide was offered at various locations at the high school building, including the library. There students brought their lunch in to hear the speech that had prompted an outcry from parents and conservatives that it would cover a political agenda. Even after the text of the speech was released the weekend before the speech, some schools in our area did not show the event that was broadcast on the White House website as well as cable news networks.

However, the 20-minute speech reiterated Obama’s push for students to stay in school, strive to overcome failure and determine skills and talents.

“I liked it,” Sarah Craft, a South Point sophomore, said. “Everything he said are the same things I’ve been trying to tell myself. He summed it up.”

Kadesha Fox, a South Point freshman, was impressed with the way the President address the young people at Wakefield High School at Arlington, Va.

“I looked for the way he was speaking,” she said. “It is real, not just a memorized speech.”

Neither Jordan Bruton nor Marcus Cochran, both seniors, said they could not understand the recent controversy that grew when Obama announced he would give the speech.

“I didn’t see anything wrong with it,” Bruton said. “It inspired me to do my hardest this year.”

Cochran called the speech positive.

“The fact that he cared enough to give it,” Cochran said.