The Faulkner County Library will temporarily suspend availability of its four meeting rooms to the public following complaints after a pair of events in January.
Complaints from different members of the community started after one group hosted a "pastor story time" in one meeting room while another group hosted an "inclusive story time" just down the hall on Jan. 14.
Library Director John McGraw said the two events left patrons and community members confused.
"One of the problems is that there was a lot of confusion on whether or not these were library programs," McGraw said. "People were calling and saying we shouldn't have the pastor story hour because that's not what libraries are for and we shouldn't have the diversity story hour because that's not what libraries are for. I kept saying over and over again, these are not library programs. We don't do anything but give the public the space to have a public meeting."
McGraw said the ability to reserve one of the four rooms has been removed for the time being. The space will be used for library programming until the library board meets in March to discuss the policy further.
"For now, we've cancelled all the programs for the public, got ourselves out of the public meeting business and are trying to shift towards more programming for children, more programming for adults," McGraw said.
Whether the library will open the rooms for public meetings is to be discussed in the board's March meeting.
Faulkner County Judge Allen Dodson said Wednesday that he advised the library's board to adjust its public meeting room policy.
"If you think you can better control [the public meetings], control it," he said he advised the board. "If you can't, figure out what that looks like for the library."
He said the library should consider requiring more information on what speakers might be using the room for, but that he trusts the board as "experts" of the library to study the issue and determine a solution.
"Removing reservations permanently will cut Conway off from resources we've depended on," said organizers with the Coalition for Social Justice, which sponsored the inclusive story time. "Black and Brown queer communities will always be disproportionately affected by exclusion, and they're also the ones who have rallied behind the library in the past."
According to a press release from the group, they decided to host an inclusive story time event in one of the meeting rooms after a pastor hosted a story hour where "he read books villainizing and othering queer people."
"We made no attempts to halt the pastor story hour, as the meeting rooms in the library are public spaces available to be used by all," the press release said. The statement also said a Quorum Court member attempted to enter the inclusive story hour to take a photograph of the kids inside in what they believe was an attempt to "win political points."
The public rooms -- two of them small and two large -- had been reserved by pastors, local organizers and other various groups on a first come, first served basis.
Meetings held in the rooms must follow the laws of open meetings and allow entrance to anybody who attends.
As for children and the content available -- Dodson said the library should not consider removing any content, but discuss ways to control how accessible certain content is to certain age groups. He suggested the library consider placing more inappropriate material higher up, away from kids or talk about ways to better navigate protecting children in the library.
"I want to discuss this with the other board members and discuss it with John and see what their thoughts are," said library board member Stephanie Vanderslice. "I think it's unfortunate that this has come up. I think the more the library can be used for everyone, the better. But clearly, that's not what's happening right now. I'm hopeful that we'll be able to work out a policy that is fair to everyone."
McGraw said the board will discuss the possibility of eliminating the four rooms for public use entirely, using the space for library programming.
"We outgrew this building about 30 years ago," said McGraw. "We do a massive amount of Conway programming and we are at the limit of what we can do around having four meeting rooms to the public. We checked out those rooms roughly 1,200 times in the last year."
McGraw said the January meeting were not the first issue the library has run into regarding the meeting rooms.
"In 2017, we had a Neo-Confederate group, the League of the South, wanting to have their annual convention here," he said. "They didn't recognize that these are open meetings and they didn't take too kindly to Black people showing up. If you have a meeting in these rooms, you're agreeing to them being an open meeting."
He added that the library continues to face spacing issues, often leaving patrons with no place to park when attending story times and no room for library programs when hosting public meetings.