Lawrence school board member Leonard Ortiz said Thursday the financial crisis in public education — exacerbated by mandates of the federal No Child Left Behind law — should stir people to action.

There are too few people caught up in the issue, he said.

“We need to agitate,” Ortiz told about 30 people at a town hall meeting at Central Junior High School. “We need to make our community more aware of the need for funding.”

Ortiz was among five panelists who spoke at “No Dollars Left to Spend: How Federal Legislation Affects Local Schools,” sponsored by local supporters of presidential candidate Howard Dean.

No Child Left Behind requires all public schools to demonstrate student progress on math and reading test scores. The expectation is that all students will be “proficient” in both subjects by 2014.

This year, the state reported Free State High School, Lawrence High School, South Junior High School and Central Junior High School didn’t demonstrate adequate progress in moving toward that goal.

Supt. Randy Weseman said he didn’t need an act of Congress to convince him that the needs of all children must be addressed.

“The intention of this act is what I believed my whole career,” he said. “There is not a single child I can think of in my 28 years in this community that I felt we should give up on.”

However, he said, expecting 100 percent of students to hit the same level academically is flawed.

“This is a significant challenge,” Weseman said. “It will take a commitment of resources from the people who issued the mandate.”

Becky Fast, constituent services director for U.S. Rep. Dennis Moore, D-Kan., said at the meeting that Congress was billions of dollars short of meeting its financial obligations to No Child Left Behind.

Moore, who represents a district that includes east Lawrence, introduced a bill in June that would suspend mandates under the law until full federal funding is approved, Fast said. The bill has 46 sponsors but doesn’t appear to have broad enough support for passage.

“The goal of the legislation was to create discussion, pressure to get No Child Left Behind fully funded,” Fast said.

The panel also included Sharen Steele, New York School principal, and Barbara Bishop, director of Arc of Douglas County.