Reviled in Puerto Rico, sent to prison for corruption. Can this Philly native remake herself?

There was a time when Julia Keleher was just a girl from South Philly who’d made it big. She went from Philly’s most prestigious university to the U.S. Department of Education to her own consultancy — which delivered her to Puerto Rico, the site of her greatest challenge yet.

There, she became the government’s most powerful education official, installed by the island’s governor to overhaul Puerto Rico’s troubled public schools. “Break the system and rebuild it again,” the governor instructed her.

In those days, she crisscrossed the island in her government SUV, snapping selfies with students and proclaiming her vision of school reform.

Now, the 48-year-old is confined to a few winding streets in the quiet, grassy Delco subdivision her parents moved to when she was at Penn. She’s allowed to walk these streets for just 45 minutes a few times a day. House arrest.

» READ MORE: How a Penn grad and Delco native is tied to Puerto Rico turmoil

But Keleher’s not complaining. It sure beats prison.

Strip-searched. Disrespected. Treated like animals, Keleher says, she and all the women.

Alderson, the minimum-security federal prison in West Virginia where Martha Stewart served time, was a desperate place.

“No one speaks hope into the women’s lives,” she says, on one of her 45-minute walks. She’s invited a reporter along because she wants to tell her story, now that she’s returned home after nearly six months inside.

“It’s not right,” she says, her voice cracking, as she grows weepy. “That’s a human being that has to come out into the world.”

Just six years ago, Keleher was hailed as an education rock star. She charged into Puerto Rico with a bold vision to disrupt one of the country’s most challenged school systems. Her supporters likened her to a storm — the kind needed to bring transformative change. But during her two-year tenure, Keleher closed hundreds of schools and pushed to bring charters and private-school vouchers to the island, enraging families and teachers who accused her of privatizing their public education system.

They called her the Betsy DeVos of Puerto Rico. They called her Hurricane Keleher — the kind of storm that causes irreparable damage.

Then, in the summer of 2019, three months after she resigned due to what she called a toxic political environment, federal agents arrested her and another top government official. The indictment sparked the first protests that would eventually bring down her champion, Gov. Ricardo Rosselló.

“Public corruption continues to erode the trust between government officials and our citizens,” said U.S. Attorney for the District of Puerto Rico W. Stephen Muldrow in a statement after Keleher’s second indictment. “Defendant Keleher exploited her government position to benefit herself and other private individuals.”

» READ MORE: #RickyRenuncio: Philly Puerto Ricans reflect on the governor’s resignation and the movement that inspired it

Keleher initially said she was innocent. Two years later, after the government dropped some of its initial charges, she pleaded guilty to a slimmer set of charges — two felonies involving conspiracy to commit fraud.

She admitted to approving a road-widening project on school property in exchange for a deal on a luxury apartment — $1 to rent the unit for three months, and later, a $12,000 incentive to buy it. She also pleaded guilty to knowing that a former gubernatorial candidate’s campaign manager would get paid as a subcontractor on a contract that did not allow subcontractors.

Now, nearly a year after her sentencing, Keleher stands by the disruption she carried out. “It was working,” she says, “which I think is why everybody got upset.”

But at the same time, as she attempts to remake herself as a criminal justice activist, she insists that “what happened to me” in Puerto Rico is not important. It’s the horrors she experienced in prison, the ones that awakened her to the inhumanity of the country’s so-called justice system — that’s what deserves attention, she says.

At the kitchen table, with her parents sitting within earshot but out of sight, Keleher explains how she believes she got screwed.

The teachers’ unions were so powerful. Her Spanish wasn’t quite good enough, so sometimes she’d offend people by mistake. And because of the island’s more than a century-long colonial relationship with the U.S., Puerto Ricans did not take kindly to a white lady from the mainland coming in and telling them she knew best. That, she says, was a hard sell.

The way she tells it, she was doing the difficult, necessary work of change — “Somebody had to be the responsible adult in the room,” she once said — and Puerto Ricans thanked her by screaming, “Julia, go home!”

“She’s been a superstar,” Rosselló said about her in 2018. “She’s been a great breath of fresh air here in Puerto Rico. Of course, it’s not without resistance, as [there always is] when transformation comes along.”

When he hired her for the $250,000-a-year post, Keleher was an education consultant in Washington, D.C., known for her ability to get government grants. Puerto Rico had been her client.

Rosselló, the MIT-educated son of a former governor, had chosen Keleher because of her status as an outsider who also had experience with the department. Insiders, he said, were already tarnished by the system.

Faced with the proposal, Keleher remembers saying to herself, “Maybe this opportunity presented itself because you really can change the problem.”

When Hurricane Maria devastated the island in 2017, Keleher saw an opportunity.

She had already shut down nearly 200 schools, what she described as a necessary response to low school enrollment and a massive budget deficit. But after Maria wrecked school buildings and drove more families out of Puerto Rico, she forged ahead, closing an additional 250 of the roughly 1,100 schools.

She did not consult the people who would be affected by the closures. Her actions forced families and teachers to travel long distances across the island, sometimes over dangerous mountain roads, to get to their new schools. And she introduced the island’s first charter, likening her plan to the response in New Orleans after Katrina, where nearly no non-charter public schools remain.

As for the thousands of parents and teachers who marched in the streets, protesting Keleher’s charter push and demanding for schools to be reopened? “Yo no voy a responder a las manifestaciones!” she said in 2018. I do not respond to protests!

In a recent interview, Aida Díaz, former president of the Puerto Rico Teachers Association, said the problem was not that Keleher was a white woman from the mainland. It was that she had never held leadership positions within the department — not superintendent, not school director — before becoming its chief. “That was why they didn’t trust her,” said Díaz, who added, “The teachers, they don’t pardon her.”

Some believe justice has yet to be served. “The massive school closures that she led are something for which she will never serve one day in jail,” said Mercedes Martínez Padilla, president of the Teachers’ Federation of Puerto Rico, after Keleher was sentenced. “That was a crime against the children of our country.”

Even now, with a black monitor on her ankle, Keleher still talks as if she’s in charge, riffing on funding formulas and the National Assessment of Educational Progress. She defends the actions she took in Puerto Rico, speaking of how some students didn’t have a math teacher or textbooks. The buildings were in shambles — mold, termites, water pouring through the roof. She did what she thought had to be done.

There is at least one decision she regrets. She wishes she engaged “the impacted community” in Puerto Rico during her tenure. It’s a realization she comes to after attending a training by the Delaware ACLU that empowers formerly incarcerated people to tell their stories. She says she should have gone to these communities with her research-based solutions and asked them, ‘Tell me how this makes the most sense for you because you’re living it.”

Maybe then, she says, they would have been invested in her plan.

In the wake of Keleher’s guilty plea, friends and colleagues rushed to defend her.

“She’s not guilty of anything other than intensity and trying to get things done quickly,” said her friend Andy Plattner, an education consultant, in a recent interview.

Lanny J. Davis, who is close to the Clinton family and at one point was Keleher’s lawyer, said she was convicted by “overhyped media coverage on the island.”

At her parents’ house, when asked about the guilty plea, Keleher says that she did the things she pleaded guilty to but that she is not corrupt, and that there are ways to prove this. And then she breaks down.

“You can look for your own information, but it doesn’t have to be anything I said,” she says, between sobs.

“And that’s enough for me because I’m not trying to be right,” she says. “I don’t wanna go back to prison. I don’t want any more problems.” She stops crying for a moment and suggests a court document that could be useful in showing how she was victimized. Then, she continues:

“It doesn’t matter what happened to me. It matters that we’re paying attention to how the system works.”

Weeks later, she reaches out to say that after a year and a half, she’s finished a draft of her book.

It’s a memoir called Eye of the Storm, chronicling her experiences with “the challenges in public education in Puerto Rico and America’s criminal justice system.”

“I don’t want it to be about me,” she says, adding, “I’m just one of many of us here trying to make the world a better place.”

This story originally misstated the year Hurricane Maria occurred. It happened in 2017.