Norwich — Almost nothing is normal in education this summer, but after arriving on campus, new Norwich Free Academy Head of School Brian M. Kelly is trying to settle into a routine, meet staff and partner district leaders, drive around without getting lost and figure out how to open school amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Kelly, 48, was hired by the NFA board of trustees in May after the departure of Head of School David Klein. Kelly’s path to NFA was marked by COVID-19 detours.

Kelly had been general director of Colegio Granadino, a Spanish-English bilingual K-12 school in Colombia. He was in Florida in April for a business and personal trip when NFA called to invite him to campus for an interview.

COVID-19 travel restrictions prevented him from returning to Colombia to finish that school year, so he remained in Florida. He had to self-quarantine for two weeks when he arrived in Connecticut on June 29, per Gov. Ned Lamont’s order.

“I’ve been really involved in what’s going on,” Kelly said Thursday morning, sitting on a stone bench outside Slater Memorial Museum. “The board has been very helpful in sharing information.”

Although Colombia has a low coronavirus rate, his wife, Vanessa, and children, Thomas, 3, and Gabriella, 2, remain in Colombia under an international travel restriction.

He attended virtual meetings, had NFA staff drop off any documents he had to sign, and finally arrived on campus Tuesday. Administrators and the 12-month staff have been on campus, and teachers have been in and out working on their start-of-school plans. Kelly has contacted the eight partner district superintendents, met some of them virtually and has scheduled in-person meetings with three thus far.

“It’s been a wonderful first few days,” he said, “getting to finally put names to faces and not having virtual meetings.”

Kelly’s first two months will be dominated by planning for the return of school. Freshmen and students at the NFA Sachem Campus are scheduled to start Aug. 26 and grades 10-12 on Aug. 27. Like all school districts across the state, NFA must submit its reopening plan to the state Department of Education by July 24.

“Safety is the most important thing in my mind, and how to do that with such a large population of students certainly is a challenge,” Kelly said.

NFA’s sprawling campus should help facilitate in-person education, especially if there’s a hybrid model of 50% of students on campus for in-person learning and 50% in remote learning. "We have the buildings and the space to do that," he said.

A staff committee is studying the state's 50-page reopening guideline plan released June 29 and how NFA can meet mandates for masks, social distancing and keeping students in small groups called cohorts to reduce the spread of infection.

The plan could change at any time.

“I told my admin team here that we have to be completely comfortable with developing a plan that has several different scenarios and also be prepared for at the last minute to do a complete turn based on what’s happening in the rest of the country," Kelly said. "It’s going to really require careful communication between various districts and various health organizations and the government.”

He said he was attracted to the NFA job after two decades working in international schools overseas, because of its unique status as a publicly designated high school with a college-like campus and diversity among its 2,300 students.

In addition to the many immigrant students who live in the greater Norwich area, NFA had 50 international tuition-paying students last year, mostly from Asian countries. About half graduated, NFA spokesman Michael O’Farrell said. It's uncertain whether any who went home when school closed will be able to return.

Kelly hopes to keep NFA as an attractive school for foreign families looking to educate their children in the United States.

“For me, I just see a school that has so much potential to be a difference-maker in the world,” Kelly said. “Shifting from international education to NFA isn’t that much of a stretch because of the diversity that’s here. It’s exciting for me to be dealing with a different population of kids and it’s meaningful for me at this moment in time to be back in my own country. I think it’s the right time for me to be giving back to education here.”

Kelly, who is bilingual in English and Spanish, has taught and held school leadership positions in Greece, South Korea and Colombia.

“I’ve worked in the Far East, Western Europe, and obviously in Latin America," he said. "There definitely is interest in the Latin American private schools for good exchange opportunities, so I definitely think it’s something we’ll be looking at in the future.”

c.bessette@theday.com