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Principal Susan Charles of Ohlone Elementary School doesn't like talking to the press, except about Ohlone.

"Let's talk about our school, not about me," she says in a laughing West Indies lilt inherited from her childhood in Dominica -- an impossible wish.

She was front and center at last week's Palo Alto school-board meeting, answering questions about the community dispute over whether to create a "Mandarin immersion" program at Ohlone. During her comments she expressed a candid hope that the board May 22 reaches "a decision that sticks" about Mandarin immersion, unlike a board vote in late January.

And Charles recently was designated president and sole spokesperson for the new Palo Alto Management Association (PAMA), an independent professional organization that grew out of a so-called "crisis of trust" last year between the district's top administration and principals, vice principals and program directors.

Speaking from her corner office overlooking the large playfield and school yard in the Midtown neighborhood, Charles transitioned easily from specifics about both topics to a personal philosophy that applies to each topic, or to education generally, or schools, or community debates, or people.

"When emotion drives the discussion, reasonableness flies out the window," she said of her take on the world in general and on the community's division over the Mandarin-immersion program and other issues.

She has offered to house Mandarin immersion at Ohlone rather than displace students from traditional neighborhood schools -- a sticking point that triggered initial opposition to the program. Many opponents also object to proceeding with a small specialty program in the absence of a district-wide language policy and implementation plan for elementary schools.

"Good people start hurting each other," she said of some of the emotion-laden public and private comments she has heard, some spilling into stereotyping based on race or ethnicity.

"That's a discussion we should be having," she said. "I don't tolerate that."

She said it's past time for people to seek new approaches to the Mandarin-immersion dispute and begin to heal breaches it has created, and she expressed optimism about that being possible.

She favors creating a different language focus at each elementary school.

"I love to think outside the box," she said.

Such an approach would reflect the broad diversity of languages spoken in the homes of Palo Alto students, from Indian to Korean, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, Tagalog and others.

"I thought this was a wonderful (new) idea but then found it was being done in Minnesota" -- proving it's possible, she said.

Her own life reflects a diverse exposure to multiple languages and cultures.

She was born in Antigua -- "in the West Indies, we don't call it the Caribbean" -- to parents who were from Dominica. Her father was an engineer who worked on oil-company bases, and the family followed him to Aruba, where she lived for 12 years and learned to speak Dutch in school.

"I started in life (in Dominica) speaking French Creole and English," she recalled. When her family moved back to Dominica she was "immersed in English" in high school and forgot most of her Dutch. But the benefits of being exposed to multiple languages and cultures stuck with her.

The real culture shock was when she came to the United States.

"It was a big one," she said of arriving in New York City, where among the towering buildings and traffic she saw police officers wearing guns.

"I'd never seen a gun before in my life," she said. "And there was the vastness of this country. I'd lived on islands all my life."

She attended Santa Clara University, where she majored in English and philosophy, within the broad scope of a Jesuit education with its strong emphasis on "ethical values, and why you have to be an ethical person.

"It reminds you that you are part of a community, part of the world and that you have a responsibility when you are part of the world. It teaches you what is most important, and that still remains a 'core value' to me."

She returned to Dominica to teach at her old high school, where she met and married Jeff Charles, a biology and chemistry teacher who had an interest in journalism -- his father had been a newspaper publisher. His avocational interest landed him a job with the BBC, and they spent 2.5 years in London, England, while he headed the BBC's Caribbean news service.

Jeff left the BBC to pursue a Ph.D. in communications, and in mid-1975 they moved into an apartment at Stanford's Escondido Village, moving straight from fog-bound London to the California sun. In their 42 years together, she and Jeff have had four children, Anthea, 41, Yvonne, 39, Melicia, 34, and Vignetta, 30, not counting a son who died at birth.

While living in Escondido Village, she began working toward a master's degree in counseling psychology, first back at Santa Clara and then at University of California, Berkeley, yet another cultural adjustment.

"I loved it," she said. After a lifetime of attending Catholic schools, "it was my first public school."

With reluctance, Charles looked back over the last several years in the school district and the relatively urgent emergence of PAMA, of which she has been named president and public spokesperson.

"This is quite a responsibility. You have the responsibility not just to yourself but to 56 other people. One has to be even, and I try as much as possible to speak as factually as I possibly can ... to be as objective as possible so at least I am representing the majority view."

She said she regretted that the district's trust and communications issues became public last September. But she said she especially felt saddened that the school board and administration really didn't address the core issues until they were thrust into public view.

She said she is feeling optimistic in that area, however, with the arrival this summer of a new superintendent and continued trust-building help from facilitators Geoff Ball and Associates.

Prior to the emergence of PAMA late in 2006, Charles had been part of a small "meet and confer" group of middle managers, along with Principal Scott Laurence of Palo Alto High School, Principal Larry Thomas of Duveneck Elementary, Jane Lathrop Stanford Principal Don Cox representing middle schools and several others.

"Some issues are best resolved in private and in good faith. That is always the goal," she said. Her husband taught her that speaking to the media and going public means you are talking to a vague audience with wide disparities of knowledge of an issue, making "the interpretations of what you say as diverse as the audience."

Efforts to raise the longstanding core issues of trust and communications had begun in the spring, culminating in a June 6 letter outlining both the broader and some specific concerns.

A June 19 meeting of the Management Team -- the district's middle managers -- was called to review the letter and summarize the issues.

"I was shocked at how many showed up," about 50 out of the 56 persons in the team.

She said she was only planning to summarize a meeting with the district's human-resources representative, Assistant Superintendent Scott Bowers.

"What came at me was this depth of feeling, a depth of frustration. Someone said, 'Maybe we need to form an association or union,'" she recalled. She was designated, as the person making the report, to also investigate the alternatives.

"I think I became president of the group by default," she said. "I never belonged to a union or association." The choice between forming an independent association and affiliating with the Association of California School Administrators as a "union affiliation" was overwhelmingly in favor of the independent association when a poll was taken in late August.

The school board had been briefed on the concerns and asked the group to prioritize them, a task that fell to Charles.

"I had written a soft draft," but the group as a whole "didn't like what I wrote" and requested a stronger version, she said.

That was the version Charles presented to Superintendent Mary Frances Callan on Sept. 6, reported in the Weekly in late September, when the impending formation of PAMA was disclosed along with the contents of the document.

"We never felt the need for protection" earlier in her 27 years with the district, Charles said.

But she insists she'd rather look forward than back.

"This year we had sort of a rough beginning -- call it baptism by fire. But it was a baptism. Now PAMA has become our own professional group, and we are there for each other and to make sure we are treated fairly in terms of rights and benefits.

"We have no desire to be militant but to be working in tandem with the administration, school board and superintendent," she emphasized.

There is near-unanimous support for PAMA, she said. Of the 56 persons in the middle-management category, all but two or three are members, and one of those who chose not to join favored the more extreme union affiliation instead.

Charles said she was puzzled by the severity of a public letter from three former school-board members criticizing the middle managers last October and particularly by harsh personal criticisms of her by one former board member.

"I think it was a case of 'shoot the messenger,'" she said.

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