Obama to students: Work hard in school

NEW ORLEANS, Oct. 15 (UPI) -- Grit and hard work resulted in a New Orleans elementary school doing better now than before Hurricane Katrina ravaged it, President Barack Obama said Thursday.

"(Because) everybody worked hard, everybody kept hopeful, everybody was determined to rebuild -- you now see just a school that is doing much better than it was ever doing before the storm," Obama told students at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School in the city's 9th Ward, which was flooded in Katrina's aftermath.

Obama stressed the importance of doing well in school.

"The one thing that my mother and my grandparents told me was that if I worked hard in school -- if I loved to read and I loved math and I loved science and I studied hard -- there wasn't anything that I couldn't do," he said.

The most important things children can do for themselves and their community are work hard in school and treat themselves and others with respect.

He then extracted a "pinkie promise" from the elementary school students that "every single one of you ... are going to work hard in school each and every day."