The chief executive officer of the Fund for Public Schools, Leslie Koch, talked last week to The New York Sun’s about how the city is using private contributions to help improve its public school system.

Q. How would you define your role?

A. My mission and the fund’s mission is to help bring people in New York City together in support of public schools by getting individuals, corporations, and foundations to believe that they can make a difference in public schools, volunteer and contribute to individual schools, and give financial support.

Why is it important for individuals and organizations to give to the schools?

Chancellor Klein has said, and I agree with him, that the crisis in urban education is one of the most important issues that our nation faces, and for New York City to be a great city, we need a great school system. With more than 1.1 million children in schools, that’s the next generation of New Yorkers. All of us have a responsibility, whether or not we have a school-aged child, whether or not that child is in a public school, to believe in and support what we’re doing to improve the schools and to ensure that the next generation of New Yorkers gets a great education.

Are you concerned about the growing reliance on private money to fund crucial public functions like parks, police, and schools?

PTAs have always had bake sales and raffles to help support schools and make up the difference, to pay for things like more arts programs, more books for the libraries, equipment for sports teams. New York City is a big city with a lot of communities where there just aren’t resources in those communities to do that themselves. If we think of ourselves as one big community, where we’re just as responsible for kids in East New York as on the Upper West Side, and the South Bronx as much as Cobble Hill, we’re really just continuing the tradition on a city scale of what communities have done for generations.

Where does the money you raise go?

We raise money by initiative. I work directly with the chancellor, and he establishes priorities. A lot of the private funds we’ve raised over the last year and a half have gone to support the New York City Leadership Academy, which is the training institute for principals….We’ve raised money for the parent involvement initiative. We’ve raised money for music and arts education, and now with the funds from Get Organized we’re continuing the work in libraries.

Which programs does the arts money support?

It’s gone to improved music education programs, to refurbished arts facilities in schools throughout the city. … The Bank of America grant is going to a variety of programs to support the new arts curriculum and training for our teachers. One of the programs they’re supporting is, we are launching a culture pass for our principals [today].

What’s that?

The culture pass will give our principals free admission to a broad array of museums throughout the city, as well as reduced prices at several performing-arts organizations. The idea is that by giving principals better access to the arts themselves, that will give them more personal experience with the arts and help them guide and develop the arts programs in their own schools.

If Albany sends the city billions of extra Campaign for Fiscal Equity dollars, will the fund retain its importance?

I think it will always be important. Private dollars help schools add new programs, and they help the system as a whole innovate and try new things. That’s what private money has always done, and what we’re doing at the Fund for Public Schools is doing that at a bigger scale.

Which donations or other accomplishments are you proudest of since you came to the fund a year ago?

About a week before I permanently moved to New York, we did that little concert with 90,000 New Yorkers in Central Park. That was a great day. That day and the day of the tag sale, where everyone you turned to there said what is this for, and they said the schools.

Any anecdotes?

We got a call from a woman whose aunt had recently passed away. She wanted to give part of her estate to the school where she’d been the school crossing guard. It turned out that she hadn’t really been the school crossing guard. She was a woman who worked in a box-cutting factory, and she cared so much about the children in her neighborhood that she volunteered every morning to help watch for them as they crossed the street to get to school. She really had a very modest life, but she left $30,000 for that school, and the school built a computer lab with that. I think about that woman a lot. She didn’t have very much money. She didn’t ask for any credit, because she left this in her will. But that small gesture – if every New Yorker thought about what they could do for the schools like what that woman did who worked in a box factory at night and then helped kids cross the street during the day, it would just be a better city and a better school system for all of us.

How much did you raise last year, and how much do you anticipate raising this year?

There’s a difference between monies received and monies raised. In Fiscal Year ’02, $9.9 million came into the fund. In those days the fund was really just a passive entity. … Since the chancellor has come to office, the fund has raised more than $80 million.

That’s all?

In addition to that, there has been more than $100 million pledged in support of public education for a variety of initiatives. That includes new schools, with $57.5 million from the Gates Foundation; charter schools, which received $41 million; the Robin Hood announcement, which was about $6 million last year, and the Trust for Public Land, which was over $8 million.

How do you target donors?

We work with donors to match sort of specific needs in the schools to what donors are interested in. Obviously, different foundations and corporations have histories of how they’ve directed their philanthropy.We work with them to match that.

Are there any individuals or groups that should get more involved in the public school system?

Everybody….There are more than 130,000 businesses in New York. If every New Yorker and every business asked themselves what can I do to improve public schools – there’s something that everybody can do. There’s a school in every neighborhood.

We hear a lot about the big donations and the big events. What can normal, everyday New Yorkers do?

There are so many ways people can contribute to schools – whether it’s just going to neighborhood schools, working with the many great organizations that have been around for years: Learning Leaders, PENCIL. Whatever you are able to do in terms of time, money, commitment, there’s a program out there, an opportunity, and again, if every New Yorker this holiday season asked themselves what can I do to make public schools in New York great, we’d really be in good shape.