Lake Luzerne library to reopen after months of closure

Upheaval after planned drag story hour led to staff and board departures

By Patrick Tine, Times Union

LAKE LUZERNE — After nearly a year of upheaval in the wake of a planned and then canceled drag reading event that eventually led to the resignation of the director of the Rockwell Falls Public Library and its closure for nearly five months, the board of the tiny library on Main Street has appointed a new leader and plans to reopen in the next few days. 

Her hiring takes effect today, Feb. 27. Board of Trustees President Ted Mirczak also said that the library will reopen March 1. 

Marion Allan was appointed as the library’s new manager at the library’s monthly board meeting Tuesday night. Allan will be a familiar face to local library patrons as she has previously worked at the library for two years as a clerk. She has also worked for more than eight years in the elementary school library in the Hadley-Luzerne Central School District. 

Allan’s appointment comes after three new members were appointed to the library board in December by the state Board of Regents after three departures last fall left the five-member board unable to conduct official business. 

Hiring a new director was the board’s top priority after the new members were appointed. Allan will serve as the manager of the Rockwell Falls library rather than its director as library directors are generally required to have master’s degrees in library science and normally run larger libraries. Mirczak has said that the distinction between director and manager is a largely cosmetic one and that whoever was chosen to run the library would have the same authority as the previous director. 

Allan would not say if she would pursue controversial programming like the drag story hour that led to the upheaval at the library. “I’m not sure what I’m going to be doing. My main objective right now is just to get the door unlocked so patrons can start checking books out,” Allan said. “I’m hoping to be able to chat with people and see what they want.” 

Though personnel challenges may have been solved — at least until board elections in May — Allan takes over a library trying to find its footing after a tumultuous year. A planned children’s reading event hosted by an Albany drag performer named Scarlet Sagamore was met with outrage from many residents who came to an April 2023 meeting at the library to express their displeasure. Among the most vocal opponents of the event was Josh Jacquard, the pastor of Victory Bible Baptist Church in rural Saratoga County. 

He said the planned reading put “our children in danger” and that attending an event run by a drag queen “sexualizes children and it is absolutely wrong.”

Conservatives around the country have seized on events for children at public libraries hosted by performers in drag, often accusing the performers and library management of trying to “groom” children. 

Jacquard was later elected to the board. 

The event was postponed before being canceled in June but contentious board meetings continued over the summer and into the autumn. At a July meeting, the previous library director, Courtney Keir, told the board that she and her staff “have been harassed during the course of conducting our day-to-day work at the library. We have written a couple of incident reports to this board. We have asked you, we have implored you to please do something about it. It has fallen on deaf ears,” Keir said. “We are tired, we are uncomfortable and to be quite honest, we are starting to become scared. We will not deal with this level of harassment anymore. We will refuse to carry on conversation with an individual of the public who calls us stupid, who points their fingers at us, who calls us liars.”

She resigned in September and another staff member also left their post. The library has been closed to the public ever since but heated meetings continued. Punches were allegedly thrown and Warren County Sheriff’s deputies were called at a board meeting just before Thanksgiving. 

More recent meetings have been calmer as the new board members have sought to lower the temperature at the gatherings and sidestep the culture-war vitriol that has paralyzed the library, instead focusing on the urgent task of reopening the building and hiring someone to run it. 

Allan said she hoped she could build on her work with young people at the elementary school in Lake Luzerne and bring it to a public library setting. “The biggest thrill I had working at the school was when I could take a non-reader and get them excited about reading a certain series. I’m just really hoping to share my love of reading with the community.”

Her favorite series?

“Kingdom Keepers” by Ridley Pearson, a series of fantasy novels about teens fighting Disney villains inside Disney theme parks. 

Photo at top: A sign announcing the September closure of the Rockwell Falls Public Library until further notice in Lake Luzerne. Photo by Patrick Tine