Los Angeles - US President Barack Obama visited the Southern California town of Pomona Thursday, where his official itinerary called for him to tour a research centre for electric cars.

   But between announcing a 2.4-billion-dollar research programme into plug-in vehicles and addressing the nation on one of its most popular chat shows, he also found time to visit a class of poor students. The closed-door visit showed he might be a different kind of president - one who follows up on the splashy media manoeuvres that are too often forgotten as soon as the cameras stop rolling.

   The city of Pomona is a lower middle-class enclave built into the hardscrabble hills of Southern California, a region that has one of the highest foreclosure rates in the nation with one in 67 houses facing repossession by banks, according to the property-tracking firm Realtytrac.

   More than half the local adults never completed high school and official unemployment is at 12 per cent with the real number of people out of work probably much higher. That's because the area is home to thousands of unpermitted workers from Mexico who have lived there for years but are not entitled to unemployment benefits.

   These are deeply troubling times in a region just outside bustling Los Angeles with its high-profile media industry and still considered one of the most prosperous parts of the country.

   But the group of Pomona high school students gave their media neighbours a lesson in effective campaigning when a video they made about the economic plight facing their families and the community gained national attention and caught Obama's eye.

   The nine-minute video was called Is Anyone Listening? and showed 17 high-scoring students at Pomona's Village Academy detailing the human impact of the recession on their lives.

   The school, whose student body has unusually high poverty rates, is housed in a former department store at an abandoned shopping mall. Despite these hardships, it ranks among the top 500 high schools in the United States.

   The recession made the students wonder if their struggles to succeed will be in vain. The video starts with students naming their career goals: plastic surgeon, environmental scientist, actress, technologist. Then a girl says, "We are all college-bound students, right, but the way things are going, we are not going to be able to make it."

   One girl tells how her parents had been persuaded to buy a home without knowing that their interest payments would balloon. They lost everything, and now the 12-member family lives in a one-bedroom apartment.

   Another student weeps for fear that his younger brothers would become homeless because their family is four months behind on paying the rent.

   Their teacher explained the video came about after the class read F Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel The Great Gatsby about a shattered American dream. When he asked the pupils if the current recession had affected them, 31 hands shot up.

   The production quality is poor: blurry images filmed against a blue backdrop interspersed with shots of the local scenery - foreclosed houses, shuttered stores and advertising for going-out-of- business sales.

   But amid an economic crisis in which the top news stories consist of billion-dollar losses and trillion-dollar bail-outs, the students' human stories struck a chord in the Oval Office after a staffer spotted it on the internet video site YouTube.

   In his first major speech on education since taking office, Obama last week described the video and addressed the Pomona students.

   "I am listening. We are listening. America is listening," the president said. "And we are not going to rest until your parents can keep their jobs, your families can keep their homes, and you can focus on what you should be focusing on: your own education."

   On Thursday, Obama kept the promise, albeit with a brief four-minute meeting. But the students said it was enough.

   "Just knowing he's paying attention to our issues and problems is great although we have a lot of work to do before change will come," student Sonya Stewart said.

   Yvonne Bojorquez, who was mentioned by name in Obama's speech, said at first "everybody was shocked."

   "To be honest, I almost cried," Bojorquez, 16, told The Los Angeles Times. "It was pretty crazy. It's very exciting. Even right now, I just want to scream at the top of my lungs."