Shana Absey faced a small classroom packed with 36 fourth-graders every day last year as a teacher at Herriman Elementary School. This year, Absey's daughter competes for attention with 28 peers in her kindergarten class.

"The No. 1 thing with education is building a relationship," she said. "In these overcrowded classrooms, teachers are banging their heads against the wall trying to keep that relationship."

Absey said school districts are barely scraping by with limited space because local funds are being depleted to pay for federal education mandates like No Child Left Behind and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act that never came through with promised funding.

"The bottom line is kids are losing," she said.

School districts may never see that federal money unless educators nationwide work together to put education on the government's list of priorities, said Tim Beagley, a member of the Utah State Board of Education.

"The entire way of education seems to be changing. It's sliding down the list of priorities," he said. "I think with all the turmoil in the world and the war, education has not been in the forefront of discussions."

But teachers, parents and education leaders are trying to put education issues back in the political debate leading up to the November elections. Educators and parents will make their voice heard Wednesday with a mass call-in to Congress asking for education funding to be at the forefront of discussion and national attention.

"We want people to go the voting booths with education as a high priority," said Dan Kaufman, National Education Association spokesman. "The raised consciousness will allow us to keep elected officials' feet to the fire. They can't just talk the talk, they have to walk the walk and actually pay for these programs."

Many citizens took the first step in that effort Wednesday night when they met in more than 3,800 "house parties" nationwide to discuss obstacles to education and how to make federal candidates care about those issues. The grass-roots effort orchestrated by the NEA is the largest mobilization for public schools in the group's history.

In Utah, residents met in 24 different discussion groups throughout the state, where they signed a petition to the federal government asking officials to follow through on their promise to fund education programs.

"The federal government is spending less and less on its programs. It's a clich� of unfunded mandates, but for education it is very real," Beagley said.

For Utah schools, Tim said the real problem is that they are having to use local funds to make up for federal money that never materialized. Many of Utah's poorest schools, he said, are now facing the fact that they will be the ones footing the bill to fulfill the mandates of the No Child Left Behind Legislation.