Welcome to CNN student news, I'm Carl Azuz, it's Thursday but the political world is still buzzing about president Obama's state of the union address. These speeches can give an idea of what issues of president wants to focus on. Tuesday night, he talked a lot about the economy specifically creating jobs for the American middle class. It's something that Senator Marco Rubio discussed in a Republican response. What is there so much attention on this?

"In 2009, when he took the oath for the first time, about 113 million Americans were employeed, and that number was already dropping dramatically as we came out of the Bush years. And it kept dropping until February of 2010 when it hit its lowest point, then we began this long, slow, grind, backup to where we are today. Right now, we have 1.2 million more jobs than we did when president Obama first took office. That's not nearly as robust as people would like to see, but more importantly, think about this. The job we lost over here simply weren't as good as the job we gained back over here. I'm going to explain what I'm talking about, Rutgers University did the study where they talked to a lot of people who had lost jobs and then regained other jobs, they found that 22% of those people that the jobs that they have now pay abou the same as the jobs they lost before. Beyond that, another 24% said they're being paid more than they were before. But now looked at this number, because this is the big one, more than half the people say their new job pays less than their old job. These are the people who really are struggling out there, they are working as hard as they can and they just can not move ahead in anyway, shape or form."

Next story today, remember that massive blizzard that hit the northeastern U.S last weekend. Look at this video from Connecticut and watch how much snow is building up around this clock post. This is just one night, some parts of the state got up to three feet of snow. In the city of Waterbury, all of the schools have been closed since the blizzard hit. You might think, that sounds alright, but when the city asked for help, shoveling the snow, a lot of the students showed up to pitch in.

"Because this our community, everybody needs to help out, and we're all a family."

"You've got teachers here, you've got adults here, as you can see, you've got a bunch of students here. So, you know, this is, you know, I'm amazed at the turnout, to be honest with you."

"Life if you had been staying in the house for like four days straight without school, so we just want to come help, especially those elementary schools."