Arkansas Times | March 2021

LOCALLY ROASTED COFFEE AT HOME | ROOTS OF JAN. 6 RIOT | NEW ARKANSAS MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS

MARCH 2021 ARKANSASTIMES.COM

ONE YEAR LATER

AT A PANDEMIC MILESTONE, WE CHECK IN WITH HEALTH CARE EXPERTS LIKE DR. BRIAN MALTE OF BAXTER REGIONAL IN MOUNTAIN HOME MARCH 2021

PLUS!

WHOLE HEALTH

SAVVYKIDS:

COVID SAFE SPRING BREAK

A Call To Artisans

Interested in Exhibiting and Selling at

Arkansas artisans and craftspeople are invited to join more than 100 Arkansas vendors at the Arkansas Made-Arkansas Proud craft show.

May 15 at This event is sponsored by Arkansas Times and War Memorial Stadium.

Visit wmstadium.com/pages/arkansasmade for full vendor details.

MARCH 2021

FEATURE

24 FROM THE FRONT LINES

COREOPSIS, TO-GO: Central Arkansas Master Naturalists offer a drive-thru native plant sale Saturday, March 13.

The state’s medical professionals reflect on the past, present and future of COVID-19 in Arkansas.

By Austin Bailey, Rhett Brinkley, Lindsey Millar and Stephanie Smittle

9 THE FRONT

BLACK CLAW

Q&A: With Arkansascovid.com founder Misty Orpin.

The Big Pic: A COVID-19 vaccine FAQ. The Inconsequential News Quiz: The Fast and the Felonious Edition.

15 THE TO-DO LIST

Diana Al-Hadid at the Momentary, Kevin Brockmeier’s “The Ghost Variations,” a drive-thru native plant sale and more.

19 NEWS & POLITICS

The origins of the Jan. 6 riot on the nation’s Capitol, in Arkansas and beyond.

By Ernest Dumas

42 SAVVY KIDS

News & Notes: Celebrating St. Patrick’s Day, new kids books from Et Alia and more.

Feature: Spring break micro-adventure ideas Meet the Parent: Henry Murphy 4 MARCH 2021

ARKANSAS TIMES

52 CULTURE

Victoria Ramirez of the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts reflects on the museum’s renovation and reinvention.

By Stephanie Smittle

56 FOOD & DRINK

Local coffee roasters are delivering to doorsteps amid the pandemic.

By Rhett Brinkley

60 CANNABIZ

Making medical marijuana more affordable with compassionate care discounts.

By Griffin Coop

66 THE OBSERVER Squinting at diamonds.

ON THE COVER: Dr. Brian Malte of Baxter Regional in Mountain Home. Photography

By Brian Chilson.

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PUBLISHER Alan Leveritt EDITOR Lindsey Millar CREATIVE DIRECTOR Mandy Keener SENIOR EDITOR Max Brantley MANAGING EDITOR Austin Bailey ENTERTAINMENT EDITOR Stephanie Smittle ASSOCIATE EDITOR Rhett Brinkley CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Mara Leveritt PHOTOGRAPHER Brian Chilson DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL STRATEGY Jordan Little ADVERTISING ART DIRECTOR Mike Spain GRAPHIC DESIGNER Katie Hassell DIRECTOR OF ADVERTISING Phyllis A. Britton ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES Brooke Wallace, Lee Major, Terrell Jacob and Kaitlyn Looney ADVERTISING TRAFFIC MANAGER Roland R. Gladden IT DIRECTOR Robert Curfman CIRCULATION DIRECTOR Jackson Gladden CONTROLLER Weldon Wilson BILLING/COLLECTIONS Charlotte Key

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ARKANSAS TIMES (ISSN 0164-6273) is published each month by Arkansas Times Limited Partnership, 201 East Markham Street, Suite 200, Little Rock, Arkansas, 72201, phone (501) 375-2985. Periodical postage paid at Little Rock, Arkansas, and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to ARKANSAS TIMES, 201 EAST MARKHAM STREET, SUITE 200, Little Rock, AR, 72201. Subscription prices are $60 for one year. For subscriber service call (501) 375-2985. Current single-copy price is $5, free in Pulaski County. Single issues are available by mail at $5.00 each, postage paid. Payment must accompany all orders. Reproduction or use in whole or in part of the contents without the written consent of the publishers is prohibited. Manuscripts and artwork will not be returned or acknowledged unless sufficient return postage and a self-addressed stamped envelope are included. All materials are handled with due care; however, the publisher assumes no responsibility for care and safe return of unsolicited materials. All letters sent to ARKANSAS TIMES will be treated as intended for publication and are subject to ARKANSAS TIMES’ unrestricted right to edit or to comment editorially. ©2021 ARKANSAS TIMES LIMITED PARTNERSHIP

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6 MARCH 2021

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THE FRONT Q&A

MISTY ORPIN’S NEVER-ENDING QUEST TO FIGURE IT ALL OUT THE FOUNDER OF ARKANSASCOVID.COM SHIFTS TO POLITICS.

Misty Orpin is not one to be put off by record-breaking winter storms that knock out electricity and threaten to trap her at home.

We talked to her after she’d run the winter gauntlet to a friend’s trailer, where there was heat and solid Wi-Fi. Orpin loves solving problems and habitually flings herself into projects of intimidating scale. She’s locally famous for it. In March of 2020 she launched Arkansascovid.com, a website and Twitter account that sliced through jargon and spin to help Arkansans understand the real implications of the novel virus to which no one was immune.

So far in 2021 she’s focused on the Arkansas legislature, crafting podcasts and social media posts to make it easier for people to find out what’s happening at the state Capitol and how it will affect them. Now, Orpin is teaming up with former Republican, newly Independent state Sen. Jim Hendren of Gravette on Common Ground Arkansas, a nascent panpartisan effort to foster collaboration across party lines.

Do you always have a project of some sort going? Yes, constantly. I think it comes from growing up on a farm. Farmers never stop working. When I was a kid, all the adults I looked up to worked their tails off all the time.

There was never a stop, you always had to go feed the cows or check the chickens. You just didn’t have down time. My mom doesn’t farm anymore but she still has that mentality.

She has 55 acres and she’s always chopping wood and now clearing snow. I’m not much of a manual labor person but I always have to be doing mental work.

pany her family co-owns]. It was a big transition for us, launching into additional markets, so I wanted to help do some marketing work for the company until we could grow enough to afford to bring someone in full time. That’s where we are now. Since [then], I just have been able to follow my curiosity and spend a lot of time getting nerdy about things I really find interesting. That’s what led me to the COVID thing, being able to spend a lot of time deep diving into questions I had about COVID data.

Does a common thread run through the projects you take on? With the exception of my U of A work it’s all very grassroots. I’m not interested in doing anything that’s not authentic, that’s not aimed at real Arkansans. I believe in real people. I don’t come from fancy people.

I’m a fifth-generation Arkansan who cares so very fucking deeply about this place where I live. My roots are so deep here. By God, with all of its faults, I’m proud of my state. I want to have more to be proud of.

What are the most interesting things you’ve seen at the Capitol so far this year? Dysfunction in the Senate has been a theme I’m really JOB: Co-owner of Black Apple, a interested in, the gridlock and just the inabilSpringdale-based cider brewery. ity to get good legislation passed. They’re so focused on grandstanding on national issues AGE: 41 they don’t actually have any control over, rather BIRTHPLACE: Hector (Pope County) than governing. I think we have a lot of people there in the legislature right now who have no FAVORITE RECENT TV SHOWS: “Sucidea how to govern. What they do know how cession,” “Fleabag” and “Virgin River” (“It to do is talk and just throw out scary rhetoric wasn’t good but I did watch it twice.”) to try to scare people into voting for them in the next cycle. There are people out there who would like to govern, who would like to do How did you get to this point where you can things for Arkansans, but they’re very rarely pick and choose your own journalistic pursuits? I’ve worked on a lot able to do that because of this tendency to fearmonger rather than of things. I did Northwest Arkansas trail development in the early days, lead. It’s frustrating, especially with the pandemic going on, to see the before we were the mountain biking capital of the South. That was realfirst piece of legislation that they ran this year in the Senate was the ly fun and really exciting, and I just can’t say enough good things about “stand your ground” bill, rather than anything to do with the pandemic that experience. Basically, I got to ride my bike and talk to cool people or supporting small businesses. As a small-business owner, that sucks. all the time. Who doesn’t want to do that?

We are surviving, but very few businesses are doing really, really well. A I worked on downtown Springdale revitalization for a couple of years, lot of businesses are operating at half their revenue to a quarter of their then took a break to have my toddler. I went to work at [the University revenue. We could use some help and some innovative leadership. We of Arkansas at Fayetteville] in economic development for a little while. are not seeing any leadership, much less innovative leadership, from the Then I decided to just focus on Black Apple Cidery [the hard cider com- majority of our representatives.

NAME: Misty Orpin

ARKANSASTIMES.COM

MARCH 2021 9

THE FRONT BIG PIC

VACCINES ARE OUR BEST SHOT AT BEATING COVID-19 Answers to frequently asked questions.

Arkansas trucked in 850,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccine as of Feb. 23. But chances are, you didn’t get one (or, ideally, two) of them. Arkansas is home to roughly 3 million people, and we each need two doses. Clearly, we have a way to go before achieving herd immunity, which won’t come until at least 80 percent of the population has been either infected by COVID-19 or fully immunized against it.

So who can get shots, and when? Where? How? Here’s a guide, made up of vetted facts, certified best guesses and maybe some wishful thinking. Plans for COVID-19 mitigation in Arkansas change daily. Making long-term plans for a vaccine rollout is tough when no one knows how many vaccines might be coming our way each week, and where needs will be greatest.

But for now, this is what we know:

CAN I GET A VACCINE? Each state sets its own rules and timelines on who can get the COVID-19 vaccine. In Arkansas, the vaccine is being made available in phases, with certain at-risk populations taking priority.

THE FIRST GROUP, PHASE 1-A, BEGAN RECEIVING VACCINES IN DECEMBER 2020. THIS GROUP INCLUDES: • • • • •

Health care workers; Residents and staff of nursing homes, assisted living facilities and other long-term care facilities; Police and firefighters who work as first responders; Morticians and people who work with blood donations; Correctional staff involved in patient care and transfer.

THE NEXT GROUP, PHASE 1-B PART ONE, BECAME ELIGIBLE ON JAN. 18. THIS GROUP INCLUDES: • •

People age 70 or older; Educators, childcare providers and school staff at all levels;

ON FEB. 23, ARKANSAS OPENED VACCINES TO ALL PEOPLE AGE 65 AND OLDER.

AT A YET TO BE DETERMINED DATE, UP NEXT WILL BE THE LATTER PART OF PHASE 1-B. THIS SECOND WAVE INCLUDES: • •

Firefighters, police and correctional facility staff not covered in 1-A; People who work in manufacturing, grocery stores, public transit, the U.S. Postal Service and essential government and community services.

APRIL IS THE CURRENT BEST GUESS FOR WHEN VACCINES WILL BE AVAILABLE TO PEOPLE IN PHASE 1-C. THAT GROUP INCLUDES: • • • • • • • • • • •

Adults of any age with high-risk medical conditions, People who work in jobs with lots of unavoidable human contact, including: Food service, Transportation and logistics, Water and wastewater, Shelter and housing, Finance, IT and communications, Energy, Media, Public safety and public health.

WHAT ABOUT PEOPLE WHO DON’T FALL INTO ANY OF THE ABOVE CATEGORIES? Estimates vary on when vaccines will be available to the general public. It could be summer or even fall.

FOR PEOPLE UNDER AGE 18 THERE’S EVEN LESS CLARITY ABOUT A TIMELINE. Vaccines are still being tested for safety and 10 MARCH 2021

ARKANSAS TIMES

efficacy in young people, and the FDA has yet to approve them for children and teens. Of the two types of vaccine currently available, the Pfizer version is approved for people age 16 and over. The Moderna vaccine is approved for people 18 and over.

SOME OF THOSE DESCRIPTIONS OF WHO’S ELIGIBLE IN THE DIFFERENT PHASES SEEM VAGUE AND CONFUSING. HOW DO I KNOW IF I MEET THE CRITERIA? In many cases, employers will organize on-site vaccine clinics and directly notify employees who are eligible. Beyond that, there’s not much guidance yet on how to figure out what phase you might fall into. Gavin Lesnick, a spokesman for the Arkansas Department of Health, said more guidance will be forthcoming.

I MEET THE ELIGIBILITY REQUIREMENTS TO GET A VACCINE. SO WHERE CAN I GET ONE? If your employer hasn’t set up a vaccination clinic for you, you will need to make your own appointment at one of the hospitals, Walmarts or private pharmacies administering vaccines.

Visit arktimes.com/vacccines for a list of Central Arkansas locations.

THE PLACES I’VE CONTACTED ABOUT GETTING A VACCINE ALL HAVE WAIT LISTS. SHOULD I GET ON ALL OF THEM? Lesnick says no. “The real drawback in getting on multiple wait lists is that you would be taking appointments/wait list spots away from other people and also distorting the data on demand. Multiple pharmacies would

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be planning for you to get a shot when really you will only receive it at one. We have asked Arkansans not to do this and to reach out to a pharmacy in their county or near their home.”

I GOT MY FIRST DOSE SCHEDULED. HOW DO I GET MY SECOND SHOT? The provider who administers your first dose will make arrangements for your second dose.

Make sure you know where and when to show up for your second vaccine dose before you leave your first vaccination.

DO I NEED TO PROVE I’M ELIGIBLE TO GET A SHOT? IF SO, HOW? Anecdotally, we can say that some people are asked to show proof of eligibility when they go for their vaccines, and some are not. Teachers and health care workers have reportedly used work badges or school letterhead as passports to immunity. People in subsequent phases will likely be able to use the same types of ID, Lesnick said.

Since rules vary about what, if any, credentials are required, it’s probably best to check with the pharmacy or hospital when you make an appointment.

HOW MUCH DOES THE VACCINE COST? Nothing. Vaccine providers can bill health insurance companies to cover the cost of administering the shots, but no one can be turned away for lack of insurance or cash.

ISN’T THERE A ONE-SHOT VACCINE? At press time a one-shot vaccine by Johnson & Johnson was racing through the approval process. It can be stored in a refrigerator instead of a freezer, making it easier to ship.

WHEN DOES IMMUNITY KICK IN? HOW LONG DOES IT LAST? It takes a week or two for the vaccine’s maximum immunity to be realized. No one knows yet how long that immunity will last or if booster shots will be needed.

ARKANSASTIMES.COM

MARCH 2021 11

THE FRONT

INCONSEQUENTIAL NEWS QUIZ

THE FAST AND THE FELONIOUS EDITION PLAY AT HOME, WHILE BEING THANKFUL YOU WEREN’T DUMB ENOUGH TO BUST INTO THE U.S. CAPITOL WITH A STUN GUN.

1) Richard “Bigo” Barnett, the Gravette man who was photographed with his feet on a desk in Nancy Pelosi’s office during the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, recently had another charge added to his growing list, which could net him up to 10 years in the federal clink along with a $250,000 fine. What was the charge?

A) Wanton Boobery.

B) Clownin’ Without a License.

C) MAGAing With Intent To Be Stupid.

D) Entering a restricted building without lawful authority while carrying a dangerous weapon.

Specifically, a ZAP Hike ‘N Strike walking stick/ stun gun, capable of delivering an incapacitating 950,000-volt shock.

2) Something that could be rather dangerous in the wrong hands was recently stolen from a parked vehicle in West Memphis, with officials concerned enough about it that they called in the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the FBI, local law enforcement, the State Police and the Arkansas Division of Emergency Management to assist in its recovery. What was it?

A) A 10-page explainer on what the hell is going on with “Wandavision.”

B) The last “Trump 2020: F**k Your Feelings” T-shirt that remains unstained by bitter tears.

C) Arkansas’s only functional snowplow.

D) A 95-pound yellow plastic trunk containing a Troxler Electronic Laboratories Model 3411-B soil moisture and density gauge, which contains both highly-radioactive Cesium 137 and Americium 241.

3) The office of Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge recently put out an alert after receiving “several dozen” calls from citizens concerned they might be victims of a scam.

What was the alert about?

A) Counterfeit frozen pizzas containing Cesium 137 and Americium 241.

B) People who recently received Facebook messages from family members in south Texas begging for help, saying they’re trapped in a blizzard. That’s impossible, right?

C) People who had received political mailers from the gubernatorial campaign of former professional White House liar Sarah Huckabee Sanders, touting her dedication to honesty, decency and always telling Arkansans the truth.

D) Economic Impact Payment Cards: debit cards loaded with $1,200 government stimulus payments that were mailed out by the U.S. Treasury Department, which some citizens had suspected were fake.

4) North Little Rock Mayor Terry Hartwick has ambitious plans for the city now that he has taken office. Which of the following is a real project Hartwick has planned for north of the river?

A) He recently formed a blue-ribbon commission to study whether the North Little Rock Police Department should be forbidden from putting suspects in the trunks of their squad cars.

B) He’ll personally run a 10-cent corn dog stand outside NLR City Hall every third Thursday from noon to 3 p.m.

C) The Dogtown Promise, which gives every child born in the city limits free tuition to the bartending school of their choice.

D) Improving drainage in the long-soggy Dixie

Addition, bringing an “urgent care” medical clinic to low-income areas along East Broadway, and setting up a “pothole hotline” for residents to report chugholes.

5) Pulaski County Prosecutor Larry Jegley recently told Little Rock Mayor Frank Scott Jr. why he didn’t prosecute those issued loitering citations after they were allegedly caught watching illegal street racing in July 2020.

Why, according to Jegley, didn’t he throw the book at ‘em?

A) Because, unbeknownst to most, Jegley is the mysterious, masked driver of the flat black, 807-horsepower Dodge Challenger with “PRSCUTR” plates that has been collecting pink slips on the streets of Little Rock since last spring.

B) Because he’s a rebel with a cause.

C) Because he just can’t get enough of Vin Diesel in those “Fast and Furious” movies.

D) Because, according to Jegley, those who were issued citations didn’t actually commit the crime of loitering as spelled out in state law.

6) It was recently announced that in addition to an ongoing $142 million renovation and expansion, the Arkansas Arts Center will also have a new name when it opens again to the public. What’s the name going to be?

A) The Arkansas Museum of Fancy Pitchers and Such.

B) Stuff Old White Republicans Hate.

C) The Museum of Not Crystal Bridges.

D) The Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, which is a throwback to the museum’s original name when it opened more than 80 years ago.

ANSWERS: D, D, D, D, D, D

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MARCH 2021 13

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ARKANSAS TIMES

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the TO-DO list

BIG GREY MARE

BY STEPHANIE SMITTLE

DRIVE-THRU NATIVE PLANT SALE

SATURDAY 3/13. PINNACLE MOUNTAIN STATE PARK GREENHOUSE, 14339 GREEN VALLEY ROAD, ROLAND. 9 A.M.-3 P.M. $5/POT, WITH DISCOUNTS FOR BULK BUYERS; BRING CASH OR CHECK. Last March, many Arkansans were falling in love with backyard gardening for the first time. As the planting season coincided with a pandemic that landed in our state and left us homebound, Google searches for “DIY raised garden beds” and “planting zone map for Arkansas” skyrocketed, and kids all over whose school schedules had been momentarily capsized turned instead to poking radish seeds — those earliest and swiftest of sprouters — into prepared soil. This year, you can cut out some of that trial and error by visiting the knowledgeable folks from Central Arkansas Master Naturalists and Partners for Pinnacle, who will set up shop on a spring Saturday to sell pots of 22 varieties of plants native to Arkansas: milkweed, coreopsis, coneflowers, spiderwort, spiked blazing star and more. Organizers will present visitors with an order sheet when they arrive and load your choices as you circle around to the payment station. The group asks that all drive-thru visitors wear a mask when interacting with volunteers (yes, even though you’ll be inside your vehicle), and that visitors bring cash or check for their purchase. Proceeds will be used toward future plantings and other projects at Pinnacle Mountain State Park.

ARKANSASTIMES.COM

MARCH 2021 15

COURTESY OF THE MOMENTARY

the TO-DO list

DIANA AL-HADID: ASH IN THE TRADE WINDS FRIDAY 3/5-SUNDAY 6/13.

THE MOMENTARY, BENTONVILLE. FREE.

There is art you can view with a sense of wonder because the process by which it was made shines through in its brushstrokes or the indentures in the sculptor’s clay. Then there is art that makes you ask, “How on earth did she do that?” Diana Al-Hadid’s is the latter. The Syrian-born, Brooklyn-based artist fashions icicle-like cascades from polymer gypsum and plaster and fiberglass, often dripped around sculptural scaffolding and then peeled away after it dries, leaving a wispy impression that Al-Hadid often accents with paint, gold leaf and silver leaf. For this exhibit at the Momentary, Al-Hadid offers 10 wall panels, drawings and sculptures that she created between 2018 and 2021 and which portray, the Momentary’s website says, “reimagined elements found within the story of Gradiva, a fictitious female character from Wilhelm Jensen’s novella of the same name.” If you can’t make it up to see these often large-scale works in person, check them out at themomentary.org.

SPRING FLING MARKET

SATURDAY 3/6. BOBROOK FARMS, 13810 COMBEE LANE, ROLAND. 11 A.M.-4 P.M. This charming little winery and farm outside of Little Rock is hosting a rainor-shine, open-air market in its barn and covered patio, with live music from Grand Duo, food from Pic’Nikity Food Truck and River Bottom wine available for sale while you peruse the art, jewelry and home decor from Arkansas Woods Craft + Co., Spunky Baby Boutique, Dragonfly Studio, Humble Hill Candle Co. and more.

KEVIN BROCKMEIER’S ‘THE GHOST VARIATIONS: ONE HUNDRED STORIES’

THURSDAY 3/11. VIA ZOOM, HOSTED BY THE CENTRAL ARKANSAS LIBRARY SYSTEM. FREE; REGISTRATION REQUIRED.

PANTHEON

Acclaimed writer Kevin Brockmeier, who, with his 2014 book “A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip: A Memoir of Seventh Grade,” brought us a vivid snapshot of Little Rock circa 1985 through the eyes of a 10-year-old boy, is back with a new one. “The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories” is a collection of tales including, this event’s description tells us, “a spirit who appears in a law firm reliving the exact moment she lost her chance at love, a

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ARKANSAS TIMES

man haunted by the trees cut down to build his house, nefarious specters that snatch anyone who steps into the shadows in which the specters live, and parakeets that serve as mouthpieces for the dead.” Here, Brockmeier talks about the new book with moderator Susan Petty Moneyhon as a guest of Central Arkansas Library System’s Six Bridges Book Festival.

Find the registration link at cals.org under the “events” tab.

We have free eLearning options for all ages.

Our new Count UP program provides free one-on-one and group math tutoring for grades K-12.

Brainfuse HelpNow offers eLearning and personalized homework help in all core subjects.

Brainfuse JobNow offers live interview coaching and résumé writing help.

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Quality Care Rooted in Arkansas

cals.org THE LIBRARY, REWRIT TEN.

hope Is The Foundation. recovery Is The Journey.

In response to the growing needs of our community, The BridgeWay has expanded its continuum of care for substance use disorders. The acute rehabilitation program will provide hope and recovery for adults struggling with substance use disorders. Led by Dr. Schay, and a Board Certified Psychiatrist and Addictionologist, the Substance Use Disorder Rehabilitation Program is for adults at risk of relapse. Rehabilitation requires the supportive structure of a 24-hour therapeutic environment.

To learn more about our continuum of care for substance use disorders, call us at 1-800-245-0011.

Physicians are on the medical staff of The BridgeWay Hospital but, with limited exceptions, are independent practitioners who are not employees or agents of The BridgeWay Hospital.

The facility shall not be liable for actions or treatments provided by physicians.

Dr. Schay

Medical Director Of Substance Use Disorders & Patriot Support Program

ARKANSASTIMES.COM

MARCH 2021 17

What

HOURS of

Arkansas PBS

inspire you?

Do you explore with “Nature,” dip deeper with “FRONTLINE” or cook with “Pati’s Mexican Table”?

What if you could help keep the programs that inspire you on the air?

Every hour of programming on Arkansas PBS is made possible by support from viewers like you.

Help us meet our challenge of adding 3,000 new members

by June 30 to continue bringing you the series you love.

That’s one member an hour from now until the end of June. If we meet the challenge goal, the generous members of our Ambassadors Circle will donate additional funds.

JOIN NOW at myarkansaspbs.org/donate

18 MARCH 2021

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NEW MEMBER CHALLENGE

NEWS & POLITICS

BY TAPTHEFORWARDASSIST - OWN WORK, CC BY-SA 4.0, HTTPS://COMMONS.WIKIMEDIA.ORG/W/INDEX. PHP?CURID=98668026

DOMESTIC TERRORISM: The roots of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection go back decades.

THE ORIGINS F OF THE JAN. 6 INSURRECTION WE’VE KNOWN OF THE THREATS OF DOMESTIC TERRORISM FOR THREE DECADES.

BY ERNEST DUMAS

or many, the most disquieting takeaway from the Trump-inspired assault on the nation’s Capitol and democracy, and the ensuing effort to exonerate the defeated president of sedition, is the inevitable conclusion that terrorism and its inspirations are now deeply embedded in our culture. Right-wing terrorists like Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols, Richard Wayne Snell and Dylann Roof dreamed that they were setting up the day when patriots just like them would lay siege to the national government and return America to its conservative white destiny.

Most of them probably had not even heard of Donald J. Trump, the local dandy promoting himself in the New York tabloids as the city’s eminent masher and coxcomb but who would one day incite their insurrection against the elected representatives of the American people.

Arkansans, including our current governor, got some of the earliest warnings about domestic terrorism’s threat to democratic norms three decades ago, which perhaps explains why Governor Hutchinson, virtually alone among Republicans in this part of the country, was unwilling to give the president a pass for his role in the attack on the seat of government.

If we had been paying attention, we might have seen the 1990s confrontations between law enforcement and white nationalist organizations, such as The Covenant, The Sword, and the Arm of the Lord here in Arkansas and the subsequent Branch Davidian event in Waco, Texas, as ominous signs that might point, eventually, to the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 and, finally, to the Capitol riot of Jan. 6.

We Arkansans ignored these signs, as did everyone, until Trump’s entirely predictable claim in November that a landslide election victory had been stolen from him by socialist Democrats, sex perverts and cowardly Republican politicians in Georgia, Arizona and Michigan, a theft that had to be reversed by a great demonstration of “courage” and “combat” at the Capitol by the armed patriots who were, more or less, Trump’s personal militia.

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MARCH 2021 19

I say “predictable” because we all remember Trump’s declaration, seven months before the election, that the only way he could possibly lose was if Democrats succeeded in committing enough fraud to steal the election. It actually was far and away the most lopsided defeat of a sitting president since 1932, and the second worst in history. But by feeding them a steady diet of incredible lies, Trump led millions of people to believe that he actually had won, and that the real patriots were the Trump cultists who killed, maimed and ransacked through the Capitol on Jan. 6 to force Congress and the vice president to throw out the election and install him as president again, perhaps for life.

Arkansans had a ringside seat for the origins of the worst spectacle of modern American political history, most memorably through the prism of Hillary Rodham Clinton. The onceadmired champion for Arkansas children was over time so demonized that even her old paper, now the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, editorialized on the eve of the 2016 election

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ARKANSAS TIMES

video of themselves conducting a satanic ritual in which they killed a little girl and drank her blood, and also that the two women and other Democrats were trafficking in child sex slaves.

Republican candidates, including Trump’s campaign and Marjorie Taylor Greene, the coming congresswoman from Georgia, picked up the crazy yarn and ran with it. In February, Greene, hoping to avoid losing her committee assignments, sort of apologized to the House and implied that she didn’t actually believe some of the stuff. It was Pizzagate all over again. Who believed the 2016 tale spread by Trump and his cronies about a Hillary-headed child-sex ring operating out of the basement of a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C.?

Edgar Welch, 28, of Salisbury, N.C., did.

Despite pleas from his family, Welch grabbed his assault rifle and other weapons on Dec. 4, 2016, got in his truck and sped to D.C. to rescue the kids from Hillary. He ran into the crowded restaurant, pushing through children who were playing table tennis, firing his rifle

Arkansans had a ringside seat for the origins of the worst spectacle of modern American political history. that the corrupt woman did not deserve the vote of even one Arkansan. Trump had energized his crowds by claiming that the FBI was investigating “Crooked Hillary’’ and that if she were elected, Americans would be treated to the spectacle of their president being led out of the White House in shackles. “Lock her up!” his fans chanted.

On Jan. 6, 2021, before sending the mob down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol, Trump again energized his soldiers by taunting Hillary. He claimed, falsely, that Clinton had denounced Democrats for not stealing enough votes for her in 2016 as they had for Joe Biden in 2020. His militia, including a Conway militiaman and a Gravette yokel, surged to the Capitol and beat up policemen to try to get to Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi. Dozens of other Arkansans, including two off-duty state troopers, were in the mob.

Though mute back in her suburban New York home, Hillary was a magnet of the whole wild campaign and its bloody and treasonous aftermath. A conspiracy group had recently circulated the story on social media that Hillary and former aide Huma Abedin had recorded a

and terrorizing patrons and staff. Finding no entrance to the basement tunnel where Hillary was supposed to be sodomizing children, Welch pumped bullets into a locked door. It was a broom closet. Welch went back out, put down his weapons, surrendered to police and said he was misled. He got out of prison recently and went home to his family.

A national poll after the 2016 election showed that Welch wasn’t alone, that 46 percent of Republican voters across the country believed the yarns about Clinton’s satanic worship and pedophilia. But the Hillary hoaxes go back even further. On July 20, 1993, six months after the Clintons moved into the White House, a deeply depressed Vince Foster, Hillary’s law partner and Bill’s close friend and deputy counsel at the White House, had killed himself with his father’s old pistol in Fort Marcy Park after searing attacks on his honesty by editorial writers at The Wall Street Journal. The rightwing talk-radio star Rush Limbaugh, whose raging venom inspired Donald Trump and who died Feb. 17, told his national audience that day that Hillary had her friend murdered because he probably knew some dirty little

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OKLAHOMA CITY BOMBING: If not for a florist who worked in the building, Little Rock’s TCBY tower might have been terrorist Timothy McVeigh’s target. secret about the Clintons’ failed investment in 1977 in 230 wooded acres near the White River in Searcy County. Limbaugh’s charge made international news.

Despite her Victorian moralism, obsession with privacy, and disdain for answering slurs because it only gives them wider currency, Clinton was pretty popular both in Arkansas and nationally owing to her lifelong crusade for children when the couple launched their national campaign. She had been a founder of the national Children’s Defense Fund and the game-changing Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, authored the Arkansas educational reforms of 1983 and beyond, and after the failure of the Clinton universal health insurance act in 1994 she pushed Republican and Democratic leaders to enact the federal law that extended health insurance to nearly all the nation’s children.

Her demonization actually began before Limbaugh with an investigative reporter for The New York Times named Jeff Gerth, who came to Little Rock in January 1992 to help Sheffield Nelson, a gifted but failed Republican politician, settle scores with his mortal enemies — the energy and banking moguls, Jack and Witt Stephens — and the man who had beaten him for governor in 1990, Bill Clinton. Gerth wrote a big article for the Times introducing the newest candidate for president and implying that the Clintons were in the hip pocket of the Stephenses, long the Clintons’ political foes.

Gerth’s subsequent stories in the Times about Hillary’s ancient trading in the futures market and the Ozarks land deal made it appear that the couple were not liberal reformers, but profiteers who used Bill’s public office to cater to billionaires like the Stephenses and Tyson

Foods magnate Don Tyson, who actually had helped defeat Clinton in 1980. No one called the Times pieces “fake news,” as Trump would later claim whenever the Times or another newspaper printed something that made him look bad.

As the Clintons were heading to Washington, the seeds of grievance from civil rights, religious tolerance, social reformation, women’s rights and other harvests of modernity that would eventually produce Trump’s Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol were already bearing fruit in the mountain glens of Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas and other remote venues of America. They took the form of white nationalist, survivalist and radical Christianidentity cults, resurgent anti-Semitic bands and others radicalized by the newly transformed National Rifle Association’s claims in the 1980s that a vast plot was underway to confiscate Americans’ guns.

One of the earliest in these parts was The Covenant, The Sword, and the Arm of the Lord (CSA), a Christian cult formed on a 230-acre farm near Bull Shoals in Marion County by Rev. James Ellison. He turned the farm into a training camp for guerillas who would take on the U.S. government, which Ellison believed was controlled by Jews and nonwhite socialists.

One of Ellison’s disciples on a gun-and-moneyraising mission murdered a pawnshop owner and Louis Bryant, an Arkansas state trooper who had stopped him at De Queen. That focused the attention of the FBI and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives on Ellison’s hideout. A raid on the farm produced a mountain of weapons, explosives, gold and potassium cyanide, which was to be used to poison the water supply of large cities. The raid

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produced evidence of a plot to overthrow the government, and another siege began when Ellison and others refused to surrender.

A young federal prosecutor named Asa Hutchinson, backed up by scores of federal agents, strapped on a bulletproof vest, marched up to the locked-down farmhouse and talked Ellison and others into surrendering. He convicted them in federal court at Fort Smith of racketeering and weapons charges, but Ellison negotiated a reduced sentence by testifying against leaders of the neo-Nazi guerrilla compound the Aryan Nations in Idaho.

One month after the Clintons moved into the White House, the Justice Department’s ATF directed a siege of the Mount Carmel Center near Waco, Texas, the home of a cult of Christian survivalists that, by then, was run

by David Koresh, nee Vernon Wayne Howell, who renamed himself after the ancient Persian messiah Koresh and King David, which he thought commissioned him as the future occupier of the throne of God’s kingdom on Earth. There had been a lot of messy sex involving the leaders of the Branch Davidians and often children. Former members told the FBI that there was methodical child abuse.

Koresh refused to admit the agents to investigate the charges. President Clinton was reluctant to permit a forced entry into the compound and the standoff lasted 51 days. On April 19, a reluctant Attorney General Janet Reno authorized the forced removal of the residents and a combat vehicle breached the building and fired CS gas into it to drive people out. The place caught fire, there was gunfire inside, and Koresh and 78 other Branch Davidians, including 21 children, perished.

To survivalists, Christian Nationalists, Aryan idolaters and other grievants, Koresh and the Davidians were martyrs. And some of those in the Jan. 6, 2021, mob thought they were exacting some revenge for the government’s assault on the Christians.

But the first revenge was the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City exactly two years later, on April 19, 1995, which killed 168 people and injured 591, the biggest domestic terrorist act in American history. Timothy McVeigh, a decorated soldier in the first Iraq war, had been booted from Special Forces training as temperamentally unsuited.

He hated the Black soldiers in his unit, who endured his racial slurs. McVeigh concluded that the national government, including its lawenforcement arms, was run by socialist liberals who were going to confiscate everyone’s guns and end freedom. He had visited Waco during the Davidian siege and swore vengeance for Koresh and his followers. The “last straw” was Clinton’s signing the act barring the sale of assault weapons for 10 years.

McVeigh recruited at least three confederates, two of whom went to prison when McVeigh was executed. They needed an event so huge

and confounding that it would spur patriots everywhere to rise up and overthrow the government. Like any patriot would, McVeigh chose April 19, the day of the Waco catastrophe, for another reason — it also was the anniversary of the Battle of Lexington and Concord, which began the American Revolution. McVeigh, like his descendants on Jan. 6, 2021, thought he was starting the second American Revolution.

His first target was the home of the Clintons, Little Rock, which would represent the British column at Concord’s North Bridge and “the shot heard round the world.” McVeigh and his cohort Terry Nichols scoped out sites around the federal complex on West Capitol Avenue and picked the TCBY skyscraper (now the Simmons Bank Tower) at Broadway and Capitol, which housed scores of lawyers and several federal agencies, including the Arkansas offices of the Waco culprits, the ATF. But on the first floor he visited a floral shop attended by a friendly woman who would have perished in the bombing, and he changed plans. She saved the bank building and its tenants.

McVeigh and Nichols drove to Oklahoma City and picked the Murrah building instead.

But they needed money for mammoth explosives and for the war that would follow.

In his travels around the country to gun shows and conventions, McVeigh had developed a friendship with a kindred soul named Roger Moore or “Bob Miller,” who lived in the woods around the Royal community west of Hot Springs with his big arsenal of weapons. Moore would be dismayed to learn later that the masked man, Terry Nichols, who tied him up and robbed him of $50,000 and weapons, had been sent by his old buddy Tim. McVeigh died of a lethal injection unrepentant, still expecting the insurrection he thought his heroism had engineered. Many others would follow him in the next two decades, including young Dylann Roof, the South Carolinian who expected his murder of nine Blacks during a worship service in 2015 to trigger the bloody race war that would install Aryan control of America for good, and Trump partisan Patrick Crusius, who shot 46 Latinos, half of them fatally, at an El Paso Walmart in 2019. Crusius had written a manifesto against race-mixing and the invasion of Mexicans and Guatemalans into White America, which the president was trying to stop.

What was missing for all the fanatics was The Word from a charismatic leader. They got it and flooded into Washington on Jan. 6.

By providence, luck — or sheer incompetent leadership, my theory — it did not work, thanks partly to a suddenly intrepid vice president, Mike Pence. The worry is that democracy, even in America, is proving to be vulnerable everywhere. That ought to be a preoccupation of all three branches of government and the citizenry — including our own Republican Party.

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TALES FROM THE FRONT LINES

MEDICAL EXPERTS WEIGH IN ON WHERE WE’VE BEEN WITH COVID-19, WHERE WE ARE AND WHERE WE’RE GOING. PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRIAN CHILSON

IN A TIME when everything from politics to weather can be described as “unprecedented,” it’s hard to emphasize that one institution has been taxed and tested more than others.

But the coronavirus pandemic pummeled and reshaped nearly every facet of our medical system, forcing innovations, revealing weaknesses and pushing limits.

In Little Rock, a hospital supply chain manager who used to rely on steady, scheduled deliveries of all the necessities found himself scrumming at 3 a.m. to secure masks and hand sanitizer. Forced to hunt down scarce commodities directly from factories in Malaysia and other far-flung places, he started keeping Pop-Tarts and sandwich meat in his office for the nights when he worked through the sunrise. In Arkadelphia, a school nurse juggled her standard Band-Aids and morning meds with spreadsheets listing which students and staff were quarantining and when they could be allowed back in the classroom. A doctor in Mountain Home, father of four, took his efforts and expertise to New York during the city’s deadliest days. Then he returned to shore up defenses for when the wave hit home. Mask requirements and social distancing protocols transformed the work of hospital chaplains and mental health providers, forcing them to figure out ways to build trust and intimate connections from afar.

So how well did the medical community adapt to this overwhelming new challenge, and what changes will stay with us even after the pandemic has passed? We talked to seven health care providers to find out.

24 MARCH 2021

ARKANSAS TIMES

CURTIS BROUGHTON UAMS SUPPLY CHAIN BOSS IS AN ENTHUSIASTIC AND UNSUNG PANDEMIC HERO.

I

QUIET STORM: Curtis Broughton and his team work hard to stay out of the spotlight.

BY AUSTIN BAILEY

n the above-ground rabbit warren that is the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Little Rock campus, the brawniest work gets shuffled to the back. The shiny towers give way to squat and ruddy garages and brick office buildings, less glossy and more workaday.

The warehouse on the edge of campus, on a dead-end road on a downhill slide toward the interstate, suits Curtis Broughton perfectly.

As assistant vice chancellor of supply chain operations, if no one notices him, Broughton said, he knows he’s doing his job right.

Broughton and his team of 110 people keep UAMS and its affiliated clinics throughout the state stocked. Off-the-charts demand during the coronavirus pandemic means all those surgical gloves, hand sanitizers and face masks aren’t always easy to get. But don’t worry about it, Broughton said. He’s going to make sure the doctors and nurses of UAMS never have to think twice about whether the supplies they need will be there.

“When our physicians and clinicians walk into the room, that’s the last thing we want them to worry about, is a mask there? We want them to worry about their patients, not about that,” Broughton said.

It’s easier said than done. Inside the hospital and clinics, members of the team check inventory multiple times a day to determine who needs what, and when. In the distribution center, which has the feel of a Sam’s Club but without the free samples, a crew keeps tabs on the towering stacks of cardboard boxes. “We’re having to keep a lot of stock on hand because a lot of people are sick,” Broughton explained.

Supply chains are less reliable than normal these days, and Broughton never wants to get caught short. So he and his staff bring in pallets of hospital gowns, hand sanitizer, sanitizing wipes and the like. There are also more technical supplies, like feeding tubes and other specialized pieces for patient care. “We have a mix between products that keep our clinicians safe and also products we need to take care of Arkansans.”

Broughton moved to Arkansas from Indiana with his wife and two daughters in January 2020.

Within a few weeks of starting his new job at UAMS, Broughton knew something big was brewing. Suppliers started checking in to see what he had on his warehouse shelves, and the internal alarm bells started ringing in

Broughton’s head. The only other time he’d gotten similar calls was during an Ebola scare when he worked as a supply chain manager for a hospital in Ohio. Soon, the pandemic was picking up steam and the supply chains for must-have supplies went haywire.

Companies that used to truck in all the supplies UAMS needed still can’t keep up with demand, so the UAMS supply chain team figures out new workarounds, like going directly to manufacturers and buying in bulk.

“There’s a delicate balance between hoarding and being prepared,” Broughton said. “So we are purchasing enough product so our clinicians feel safe that when they go into the room, that the product is sitting there. The N95 mask they need is going to be there every time.”

Work schedules became unpredictable for Broughton’s team early in 2020, and they remain that way. Shipments arrive on weekends and after hours now, and staff has to be on hand. UAMS warehouse manager Jerry Lewis estimates he’s been putting in an extra 10 to 20 hours per week. Vacation hours pile up, but he’s not ready to claim them yet. There’s simply no time. “It’s the busiest I’ve seen it in 25 years,” Lewis said.

Broughton’s schedule is off, too. Locating and ordering much-needed supplies can’t always be done between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. That’s why Broughton keeps a minifridge full of sandwich meat and boxes of blueberry Pop-Tarts in his office, because he’s learned that’s the only way he can get his hands on a snack when he’s at the office at 3 a.m.

The late nights and early mornings don’t bother him too much. Broughton is enthusiastic about his unsung calling in a way that’s surprising and endearing and reassuring all at once. This guy is pumped about his job. “You can’t like supply chain. You have to love what we do. You have to love supply chain,” he said.

In his office, stowed away at the end of a gerbil maze of hallways on the backside of the UAMS security building, Broughton scrawls lists, hashmarks, thoughts about what the hospital system needs and how to get it on four oversized white boards hanging on the walls. He likens his invisible role to an umpire in baseball. “A good baseball umpire, you don’t even recognize him as part of the game.” His team operates largely unseen and only gets called out if they make a bad call. When no one takes notice, that’s a good day.

ARKANSASTIMES.COM

MARCH 2021 25

SUSAN MCDOUGAL

UAMS HOSPITAL CHAPLAIN SHARES STRENGTH WITH PATIENTS AND STAFF.

BY AUSTIN BAILEY

T

he team of chaplains and chaplain trainees at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock might not be what you expect. Some bring strong Christian beliefs and experience in the pulpit to their work. Not all of them, though. Being spiritual is a job requirement, but beyond that, chaplains are free to mix it up. They read the Bible, but only upon request. They’re happy to talk about anything or nothing at all, whatever patients and their families prefer. For the most part, a chaplains’ job is to show up for the hard stuff.

Susan McDougal, director of the UAMS Pastoral Care department, is a perfect example of a chaplain who arrived at this work via an unexpected path. Not until after a sometimes tumultuous career in banking, real estate and politics did McDougal go through the yearlong training it takes to become an accredited chaplain. Maybe her name rings a bell? Yes, she’s that Susan McDougal, the one who served 22 months for fraud and contempt charges related to the Whitewater scandal of the ’90s (charges that were eventually pardoned in full by then-President Bill Clinton).

Clearly, McDougal has walked through trying times of her own and plotted a way past them, doing her best to leave any bitterness at the jailhouse door. It was during her prison stint that she first realized ministering to others might be her true calling. The possibility of doing similar work in a formal capacity took shape after she got an invitation to speak to a group of hospital chaplains about her time behind bars.

“He wanted me to come and talk about women in jail because I had been doing some work with the women while I was there,” McDougal explained. “I talked about, ‘Who are women in jail? What do they look like? What do they talk like? Are they dangerous?’ I talked about who I met while I was there and what they meant to me.”

After that talk 14 years ago, chaplains at UAMS asked her to join their program. The Pastoral

Care department at UAMS is a sophisticated operation that includes four full-time chaplains and a revolving cast of trainees, usually a couple dozen at a time. McDougal herself graduated from the training program she now oversees.

“To learn how to minister to people in crisis, there’s no better place than a hospital to do that,” McDougal said.

Trainees at UAMS focus on understanding the

McDougal became director of the program right as COVID-19 was making itself known in Central Arkansas. The pandemic forced chaplains to make some fundamental changes in how they work. Keeping a safe 6 feet away from the people they’re caring for means chaplains can no longer hold hands or offer hugs. So far, none of the chaplains at UAMS has gotten COVID-19.

The pandemic kicked families out of hospital rooms, leaving patients lonely and in need of someone to talk to. Chaplains step in when they can to keep isolated patients in contact with family by phone or Facetime, or just to chat. Chaplains also found that the increased workload, higher death tolls and occasional need to quarantine that came with the pandemic put doctors, nurses and other staff in greater need of attention and care.

“Really, our focus has turned to the staff because this is grueling and it has gone on so long,” McDougal said. More patients are dying, and that takes a heavy toll. The people who work at the hospital have added stresses at home, too. Children are anxious and out of school, older parents are locked in and need tending.

McDougal and other chaplains wheel trolley carts full of free snacks down hospital corridors, a way to show support and keep clinicians fueled during long shifts. Chaplains also help man a free hotline anyone who works at UAMS can call anonymously, any hour of the day.

She suspects the line will stay in operation a good while longer. Despite good news about a vaccine, McDougal says she doesn’t yet see a light at the end of the tunnel. Clocking hours in a hospital during a deadly pandemic isn’t something she can get used to. But McDougal describes this relentlessly tough work as an honor. “It is an honor to be with people,” she said. “You hear their most intimate stories in the worst time of their lives.”

“REALLY, OUR FOCUS HAS TURNED TO THE STAFF BECAUSE THIS IS GRUELING AND IT HAS GONE ON SO LONG.”

26 MARCH 2021

ARKANSAS TIMES

faith, strengths and challenges they will bring with them to worried families and patients’ bedsides. That self-knowledge can keep chaplains anchored in times of stress. And stress is a constant at a Level I trauma center in Little Rock, McDougal said. “UAMS is a microcosm of the city, and it’s hard to take sometimes. There’s a lot of violence.”

So trainees in the hospital chaplain program spend a lot of time learning how to look inward for strength. “For each chaplain it’s very important that they know what they believe and who they are in their religious faith and spiritual life that will support them. They will need that support as they walk into these situations that are dire and shocking.

“My first night here, my first patient was a young man on a motorcycle who lost his leg in an accident. They came in with his leg still in a cowboy boot. Not the patient at first, just the leg,” she remembered.

The four full-time chaplains on staff cover the hospital 24-7-365, and they are never bored. “We might go from that to the NICU, where a young mother lost her child and is alone. Or there might be a family whose father or husband is dying. Death doesn’t always come quickly, and they’re worn out and tired and maybe not getting along with one another.”

SHARED STRENGTH: Hospital chaplain Susan McDougal went through trying times of her own, and says it’s an honor to help others.

ARKANSASTIMES.COM

MARCH 2021 27

LOOKING AHEAD: Larry Shackelford isn’t counting on the virus’ downward trend to continue.

28 MARCH 2021

ARKANSAS TIMES

LARRY SHACKELFORD

THE WASHINGTON REGIONAL LEADER EMBRACES ‘WARTIME’ METAPHOR.

BY LINDSEY MILLAR

T

hroughout the coronavirus pandemic, Larry Shackelford, president and CEO of Washington Regional Medical System in Fayetteville, found himself looking to the wisdom of wartime leaders of the past, including Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill. “The challenges of war are different than those we encounter when battling a pandemic, but there are similarities: shortage of supplies, adverse economic impact, fear, and most notably, lives at risk,” Shackelford wrote in September for

experts who specialize in logistics for J.B. Hunt and supply chain officials at Walmart. “We’re talking about, when vaccine becomes [more widely] available, how we as a region can work to get as many vaccines in arms as we can.” He believes Washington Regional could provide 800-1,000 vaccines per day if it had ample supply.

Shackelford, a Fayetteville native and graduate of Fayetteville High School and the University of Arkansas, has a public accounting

near the hospital’s campus. Outside of dealing with extreme temperatures in the summer and winter, it’s worked well, Shackelford said.

The hospital also designated one of its urgent care facilities strictly for patients experiencing upper respiratory symptoms. In the main hospital, it created three COVID-19 units that can accommodate up to 56 patients.

Having vaccinated staff helps with one of the more vexing problems hospital leaders have faced during the pandemic: staffing shortages.

IT’S A BIG JOB, BUT UNTIL THE PANDEMIC EMERGED, NOT ONE THAT ANYONE WOULD CALL DANGEROUS. Arkansas Hospitals, the magazine published by the Arkansas Hospital Association, on whose board Shackelford serves.

The metaphor still provides a useful frame, Shackelford said on Feb. 1. “Right now vaccines are the best ammo for this war that we have,” he said. Almost 80 percent of Washington Regional’s staff of around 3,200 has elected to receive a vaccine. Typically, the hospital provides discounts on insurance premiums to employees for participating in a wellness plan.

Amid the pandemic, it accepted the vaccine as a substitute to receive the discount. The administration got vaccine buttons printed for staff to wear, in the spirit of “trying to be out front with our patients.” Although infection and hospitalization rates in Arkansas and beyond have declined this year, Washington Regional saw a record number of hospitalized patients suffering from COVID-19 in mid-January and a record low two weeks later. Shackelford isn’t counting on the downward trend to continue.

With new, more contagious variant strains of COVID-19 circulating within the region, he’s worried Washington Regional’s resources will again be stretched thin. It’s a race to get adequate supplies of vaccines ahead of the spread of the variant strains, he said.

To that end, he’s been meeting with other Northwest Arkansas health systems along with

background. After college, he worked for a time in an accounting firm before taking a job leading the business and finance side of the Fayetteville Diagnostic Clinic. It later merged with several other clinics to become Medical Associates of Northwest Arkansas, known as MANA. Shackleford was CEO there for almost 10 years. He then joined the management team of Washington Regional, supervising clinics and outpatient services, including the surgery and dialysis centers. He became CEO in 2017.

It’s a big job, but until the pandemic emerged, not one that anyone would call dangerous. “One of the things during war that I think is important is to be there with your staff,” Shackelford said. Washington Regional’s administrative team rotates being on call in the hospital and making rounds throughout the facility. During the coronavirus pandemic, that’s included visiting the ICU and COVID-19 units. Before the pandemic, Shackelford had never donned personal protective equipment.

Since the outset of the pandemic, Washington Regional has treated more than 1,000 COVID-19 patients. As of Feb. 1, it had performed 62,250 COVID-19 tests, and its nurse-call triage center has fielded more than 112,750 calls. That volume has necessitated many changes in the way the hospital operates. Early on, it decided to open a drive-thru testing center in a vacant clinic

“Of all of our resources, our human resource is our most precious,” Shackelford said. Like other hospitals, Washington Regional has lost nurses who have been lured away by big-money temporary offers. It also saw nurses in dualincome families step away to care for schoolaged children and nurses late in their career decide to retire for safety reasons.

In its latest surge plan, Washington Regional employed team-based nursing in the ICU. Instead of two ICU nurses caring for four patients, two care for six patients with the help of another noncritical care nurse who handles tasks including providing medicine, checking vitals, updating charts and administrative duties.

The next challenge on the horizon?

Addressing vaccine hesitancy. Shackelford said the hospital had seen indications that pregnant women or women hoping to soon become pregnant were wary of receiving the vaccine.

So the marketing team has worked with Washington Regional obstetricians to create videos that discuss reproductive health as it relates to the coronavirus and the vaccine. The hospital has also partnered with the Northwest Arkansas Council, a regional economic development group, and UAMS to push out vaccine information to the region’s large Latino and Marshallese communities.

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BETH HASLEY

NURSE GUIDES ARKADELPHIA SCHOOLS THROUGH PANDEMIC WITH A STEADY HAND.

BY AUSTIN BAILEY

I

f you want to talk to school nurse Beth Hasley, you have to wait your turn. The phone in her office at Arkadelphia’s Goza Middle School rings quite a lot, with parents calling to ask about COVID-19 testing and quarantine protocols. Hasley’s computer dings over and over with new emails. Students file in and out for medicine and Band-Aids.

Hasley takes them all as they come, with an even pace and calm voice that are therapeutic in themselves. After spending the first 15 years of her career as a transit nurse, boarding helicopters to tend distressed newborns en route to urgent care, Hasley knows how to stay focused and steady under stressful conditions.

hours and juggles multiple spreadsheets to stay in command. She estimates pandemic-related issues soak up 95 percent of her workdays, and the job tumbles over into evenings and weekends. Every school district in the state has a number parents and staff can call with COVID-19-related questions. In Arkadelphia, that number goes to Hasley’s phone.

“Right now, it’s a seven-day-a-week job,” she said.

On top of handling the tedious logistics, Hasley also serves as sounding board and sage.

Teachers on the fence about getting vaccinated call for her expert advice. “I have them read scientific articles about it instead of opinion-

complain about going to school now appreciate it a lot more. They want to be there, Hasley said. That’s one reason she sent her own three children back for in-person learning in August.

Hasley was on the team that made plans for keeping Arkadelphia schools running despite COVID-19. She said she’s confident the team did its best to make school welcoming, safe and as comfortable as possible.

“Our staff has done a really good job of trying to make the students feel like it’s a normal school day,” she said. Still, elementary students now eat lunch in their classrooms, play with only their classmates on the playground and go to the same enrichment

A SILVER LINING OF UNIVERSAL VIRTUAL INSTRUCTION FOR ALL ARKANSAS PUBLIC SCHOOL STUDENTS IN THE SPRING OF 2020 IS THAT CHILDREN WHO USED TO COMPLAIN ABOUT GOING TO SCHOOL NOW APPRECIATE IT A LOT MORE. It’s a trait that serves her well as the main COVID-19 point of contact for the Arkadelphia School District. This role puts Hasley in charge of tracing every positive case in the district.

She watches video footage from classrooms to identify who came in close contact and determine who needs to be sent home to quarantine. She helps parents figure out where to take their children for COVID-19 testing and care. And she keeps track of who quarantines and when to make sure they’re meeting guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Since August 2020, more than 140 students and teachers in the district have quarantined.

It’s a lot to keep up with. “I have spreadsheets for everything,” Hasley said.

Vision screenings, health education, sick students. All those tasks school nurses handle during normal times are still on their to-do lists. So in this pandemic, Hasley works extra 30 MARCH 2021

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based pieces. I am pro-vaccine, yes. But I respect that everybody has freedom to choose, especially with something they’re just learning about.”

Her handholding extends beyond staff, to parents and students, too. Tending to the anxiety and loneliness pandemic protocols bring on can be a heartbreaker. And so Hasley, along with the two other school nurses who tend the students and staff in the Arkadelphia School District, offer encouragement, affirmation and reassurance.

“Honestly I think that quarantine does start to wear on the students. The older students especially,” Hasley said. “When it’s a minimum of 10 days and up to 14 days, that’s a lot of school time missed. And for this age group, it’s a lot of social time missed.”

A silver lining of universal virtual instruction for all Arkansas public school students in the spring of 2020 is that children who used to

activity, like art or music, every day for a week, rather than rotate through all of them each week. “We’re trying to keep classes together so if there is exposure in a group we’re not exposing more children than we need to,” Hasley explained.

Each teacher is loaded down with cleaning supplies for the classroom. Hand-sanitizing stations cap hallways. Water fountains are taped off. Instead, students are provided with bottles for the new airport-style touch-free filling stations. Lockers will stay locked this school year to minimize students’ time in crowded hallways. School custodians are adding “biotech engineer” to their job description now that they’re called on to operate leaf blower-like sanitizing sprayers after hours.

“I think every parent has some, I don’t want to say fear, but a little trepidation about school during a pandemic,” Hasley said. “It helps to know everyone is doing their best.”

CARING WITH CLASS: School nurses like Beth Hasley are taking on new duties during the pandemic to keep students and teachers healthy.

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COMPUTER SCREEN COUNSELING: Dana Herman knows there are limits to doing therapy via video call, but says there are benefits, too.

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DANA HERMAN

METHODIST FAMILY HEALTH COUNSELOR EMBRACES TELETHERAPY.

T

here’s a book in counselor Dana Herman’s office at Methodist Family Health called “What Should Danny Do?” It’s on the middle row of a low bookshelf, within reach of its intended audience. It walks the reader through a series of pivotal decisions in Danny’s school day, with each social choice leading to one of nine different outcomes, behavioral choose-your-own-adventure style.

Danny’s on the cover sporting a red superhero cape with the symbols P2C blazing across the back: “The Power to Choose!” So what does Danny do when a raging pandemic puts the whole school on lockdown?

That’s been Herman’s realm of expertise for nearly a year now — her third year at Methodist Family Health — as a therapist whose in-school sessions were upended when the coronavirus pandemic hit. In-clinic therapy visits aren’t a convenient option for every family, and setting up sessions at school tends to mean that clients can keep their therapy appointments more consistently — and that teachers and school staff can help gauge behavioral progress. When the pandemic hit and Arkansas schools pivoted temporarily to all-virtual learning, Herman said, “childrens’ lives got turned upside down.

They went from having a social life and friends, activities and extracurricular things they did to nothing, literally.”

At first, Herman said, the idea of schools being closed was thrilling for her clients. “Students rejoiced,” she said, “but then after a few weeks I started noticing more withdrawn behaviors, depression, ‘We’re missing our friends.’ ” Turns out, the notion that adolescent social lives take place on their smartphone screens — and therefore that teens might be the best-suited among us to weather an isolating pandemic — isn’t quite right.

Herman watched last spring as her clients’ proms got canceled, then their graduation ceremonies, her clients’ parents all the while consumed by questions about meeting for their families some of the more basic human needs: safety, health, a secure income. Then, Herman watched as summer came and went, her clients effectively grounded from camps, sports, trips and all the peer-to-peer interaction a summer break typically brings. “So you had an extended period of time where, for six months, they had

BY STEPHANIE SMITTLE little to no contact with friends, generally.” And that, she said, takes a toll. Her clients who had mild cases of anxiety and depression before the pandemic “were pushed to more moderate or severe, where some of them went suicidal,” she said. “Some of them had self-harm thoughts. It was kind of a perfect storm,” she said. “COVID had a snowball effect.”

Since those early days of the pandemic, Herman said, her mediums of therapy have been threefold: in-clinic appointments, school-based therapy and telehealth. How much she does of each type of therapy fluctuates depending on what the COVID case numbers look like, whether the schools with which Methodist Family Health partners are allowing onsite therapy sessions and, of course, the specific needs of each client.

Telehealth, for example, can be a godsend for a teenager who’s doing virtual school at home while their parents are at work. The client can log in to Methodist’s private platform, enter a password to access the session — just the way we’ve all been doing on Zoom for nearly a year now — and complete their therapy with minimal interruption to their schedule or their parents’ schedules, and without taking the health risk that an in-person visit can pose. That, Herman said, “has evolved the landscape,” and she’s been able to transition much of the work she’d do with a client in her office to the telehealth platform, sharing her screen when she wants to present a handout or conduct a therapeutic exercise. “You can read a lot of body cues on the camera, you know, if a client gets quiet, or starts to cry, or crosses their arms, or turns away,” Herman said. “So that in-person connection is still present, as long as it’s somebody you already have a relationship with.”

What’s more, Herman expects that telehealth, something Methodist Family Health rarely used before the pandemic, has staying power for the therapy field. With new COVID variants presenting themselves and the vaccination schedule inching along slowly, she said, “we’re gonna be doing telehealth consistently for the foreseeable future. It also has opened up a lot of benefits for parents that generally can’t take off work and come [to the clinic] all the time. Or long-distance clients who are traveling in from out of town and can’t come as often? They can now come more often with telemed. Instead of

once a month, they can come twice a month or three times a month. It’s just very convenient.

And effective.”

But it’s not for everyone. Young children with severe ADHD, for example, or who may be on the autism spectrum, tend not to do as well with therapy via video call. And for clients who exhibit self-harm behaviors or suicidal thoughts, Methodist Family Health recommends an in-person visit as a matter of client safety and crisis management.

And whether virtual or in-person, Herman said, she’s found it crucial during the pandemic to keep clients’ parents as involved as possible.

“Parents can give me insight into what’s happening at home,” Herman said. “If I’m working with a teenager connecting through telehealth, that teenager might not tell me that they’ve been crying all week, or that they cut last week.” Conversely, she said, “the mental health provider may have info that the parent needs to know. I’ve had tons of students in virtual learning tell me that they are failing classes and their parents have no idea. Or that they aren’t getting any help from their teachers, and the parents don’t necessarily know how to log onto Schoology or these online school platforms to check on their work, so they’re kind of in the dark. So, I’m able to tell the parent ahead of time, ‘Hey, the client is having a lot of anxiety over school challenges and academic problems, and here are some ways you can get more involved and help them with their online virtual school, or contact their teachers to make sure their 504 plan and IEP [individualized education program] is being followed virtually.”

Herman expects her clients in a postpandemic world will, like the rest of us, grapple with reacclimating to social environments they’ve been absent from for more than a year.

“What we’re talking about are the factors that go into adjusting back to normal life, and what is normal? … When you go back to a school environment with high structure and lots of expectations and boundaries that are sometimes greater than they are in home life, there’s gonna be an adjustment, and some students are going to have a difficult time remembering the rules, the routines, the pace. There will be adjustment pains, so to speak.”

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DR. BRIAN MALTE

BAXTER REGIONAL MEDICAL CENTER DOCTOR HEEDED CALL FOR HELP FROM NEW YORK.

BY RHETT BRINKLEY

L

ast spring, during the first wave of COVID-19 infections in New York, Dr. Brian Malte was watching the news when New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo asked for health care professionals from around the country to come and provide assistance to New York hospitals struggling to handle the sudden surge of COVID-19 cases. Given the size of New York City and the number of physicians there, “I was caught off guard,” Malte said.

Malte grew up in the Philippines and attended medical school at the University of the Philippines, graduating in 2006. He moved to Chicago for his residency training at John

were starting to return to normal after a wave of COVID-19 infections in November and December caused his load of patients to quadruple. During that period, a typical day of hospital duty for him started at 4:30 a.m. and didn’t end until late in the evening.

He said that Baxter Regional was able to match the load of patients with staffing by recruiting more nurses and pulling nurses from nonclinical positions to work with COVID patients. “This way they were able to maintain the ratio of about one nurse to two COVID patients, which afforded good patient care in a busy schedule,” Malte said.

the schools is not completely a bad idea,” he said.

Malte’s children attend school in-person.

“My kids are also trained to wear masks and face shields because you never know, kids speak a lot and sometimes they spit on each other’s faces, so I still have them wear a face shield. My kids always said that as long as we wore masks, we should be OK, so I’m surprised that even they can understand it.”

Malte has a very careful regimen before he heads home from the hospital. He showers at the hospital, his mask and dirty clothes go in the trunk of his car. When he arrives at home,

“I JUST WISH THAT PEOPLE WOULD LEARN TO ACCEPT THAT THE VACCINE IS SAFE, IT’S EFFECTIVE.” H. Stronger Jr. Hospital of Cook County and followed that with a fellowship at St. Louis University. He’s worked as a pulmonologist and intensivist at Baxter Regional Medical Center in Mountain Home (Baxter County) since 2015. Malte’s partner at Baxter Regional, pulmonologist Rebecca Martin, went up to New York at the beginning of April while Malte covered her shifts back home. When she returned later that month, Malte left for Brooklyn, where he worked 15 straight days in the ICU. When he arrived, treating patients with COVID-19 was a new concept for him; Baxter Regional hadn’t had any cases yet. “I co-managed them with other intensivists and got some ideas as to how they were caring for them, adding some of my ideas into the fray,” he said. “It was really quite hectic there. We would have ICU patients that we managed on a regular medical floor because they didn’t have enough beds.”

Malte said they were intubating patients daily and estimated that four people a day were dying in his unit.

“That was not even bad compared to when my partner went there,” he said.

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“As for physicians,” he said, “we’ve had good help collaborating with the hospitalists.

They handle most of the admissions, and I’m largely a consultant, but because of me and my partner’s experience in New York, we’ve been pretty much the go-to persons for handling patients with COVID.” Malte said that at one time there were as many as 11 patients with COVID in the Baxter Regional ICU, “which may not be a lot compared to the other hospitals,” he said, “but I can guarantee you that the staff was really strained at that time.” The ICU capacity at Baxter Regional has about 20 beds. “The thing is,” Malte said, “even as we had COVID patients, we still had remarkably sick nonCOVID patients, and they were occupying the other half of the unit.”

Malte said the capacity was never stretched to the extent that patients had to be sent to other hospitals.

Malte said the youngest COVID patient he’s seen personally is 21.

“I haven’t seen any adolescents [with COVID],” he said, “which seems to match what we’re seeing on the data showing that children are less likely to carry the virus. I think opening

he washes his hands and then takes another shower before he visits with his four daughters.

“We have one more on the way,” he said. “Our first boy, so it makes it even more special.”

Malte stressed the importance of getting vaccinated when given the opportunity.

“My main thing is I just wish that people would learn to accept that the vaccine is safe, it’s effective. If you get vaccinated now, it’s better for you. People have still gotten the virus despite the vaccine, but if you do get it, it’s not going to be as severe, so it’s going to prevent you from going to the hospital.” That risk of hospitalization, he said, is reduced by vaccine even in newer variants of the virus. But if you get COVID as an unvaccinated person, he said, “you don’t know how it’s going to affect you.” Limiting the spread of the virus, he said, limits the chance of it mutating — potentially into a more lethal version — and making the vaccine ineffective down the road. “This is the importance of getting as many people vaccinated at the soonest time. The faster we can get to herd immunity the better chance we have at controlling this and not making it an endemic disease,” he said.

SMALL-TOWN SURGE: Dr. Brian Malte’s experience with COVID-19 patients in Brooklyn made him a goto physician when he returned home to Baxter Regional.

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‘DIVINELY PLACED’: Dr. Amanda Novack’s last year has been challenging and exhausting, but also “an incredible time.”

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DR. AMANDA NOVACK

INFECTIOUS DISEASE SPECIALIST JOINED BAPTIST HEALTH AT JUST THE RIGHT TIME.

BY LINDSEY MILLAR

W

hen Amanda Novack accepted a position in late 2019 as Baptist Health’s medical director of infectious disease, she expected to focus mostly on “preventing people from getting sick in the hospital.” It’s important work, but relatively mundane, Novack explained, citing “preventing catheter-associated urinary tract infections” as an example. But in early January, she began to be concerned about the novel SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus spreading in China.

“Even before Baptist was asking me to, I started focusing more of my attention to it,” Novack said. “By February, everyone thought I was crazy for talking about a time when we might run out of surgical masks. By March, the whole

coronavirus] was going to last or not. It wasn’t obvious that we needed to spend millions of dollars to test for this thing that might be gone in a few weeks. I kind of arm-wrestled about some of those things and was very fortunate to be listened to.” Later, she helped launch the high-volume drive-thru testing clinic on Baptist Health’s Little Rock campus. She’s also often been the face of Baptist’s pandemic response in videos the hospital shares on its website and social media. More recently, she’s been treating COVID-19 patients at a monoclonal antibodies infusion clinic in North Little Rock, a joint effort with Baptist and CHI St. Vincent.

Now Novack is working behind the scenes, lobbying for a major change in the way Arkansas

the next hot spot.”

It’s ironic, Novack said, that she would be pushing now for an urban-focused approach because she spent several years of her career trying to bring infectious disease expertise to rural Arkansas.

Novack, who grew up in Maumelle and later graduated from Hendrix College and the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, did an infectious disease fellowship at UAMS and then stayed on as faculty for several years.

Later, the Arkansas Department of Health contracted for half of her time from UAMS, and she focused on antimicrobial stewardship, helping clinicians improve how antibiotics were prescribed, in part to combat antibiotic

“EVERYONE THOUGHT I WAS CRAZY FOR TALKING ABOUT A TIME WHEN WE MIGHT RUN OUT OF SURGICAL MASKS.” state was shut down.” She worked seven days a week for six to seven weeks without a break.

She got calls in the middle of the night just about every night.

“It’s not exactly what I signed up for, but the truth is that it’s been an incredible time,” Novack said. “It’s been very challenging and very exhausting. But I feel like I was divinely placed right here for this point in time.”

In an earlier phase of the pandemic, Novack spent much of her time on the logistics of detecting and preventing COVID-19. In March she lobbied for Baptist to buy testing machines.

“I said, ‘We need these very, very expensive machines’ at a time when it wasn’t clear [the

allocates COVID-19 vaccines. Instead of the state allocating doses to every Arkansas county, Novack would like to see vaccines go to the hot spots that need them most. “What makes sense from a vaccine standpoint is markedly different from any other resource. If this was insulin or cancer treatment or blood pressure medicine, I’d say absolutely spread it equally across the counties, make sure every district is equally served. But when it comes to vaccine, that doesn’t make a lot of sense scientifically.

The way smallpox was eliminated was not by equally distributing smallpox vaccine. It was by only giving vaccine to the hot spots and when those people were all vaccinated you went to

resistance in patients. That experience led her to start her own practice, ID Arkansas, and contract with hospitals across the state that didn’t have access to an infectious disease doctor. Gradually, Baptist, the state’s largest hospital system with facilities across Arkansas, began taking up more and more of her time.

“They sort of tricked me into taking a full-time position about two months before the pandemic struck,” Novack said with a laugh.

For 15 of the 16 minutes she spoke with a reporter over the phone, a fire alarm blared in the background. “I feel like that’s representative of the last year or so,” she said. “There’s always a fire alarm.”

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WHOLE HEALTH A local resource guide to our WHOLE HEALTH— mental, physical and spiritual. Take a look at these healthcare professionals who make a difference in our everyday lives.

BAXTER REGIONAL

Work where you vacation!

When the beauty of the Ozarks is combined with the culture, innovation and opportunities of Baxter Regional Medical Center, Mountain Home is truly the perfect place to live, work and play. As the city’s largest single employer — with nearly 1,800 employees and 500 volunteers — Baxter Regional is more like a family, and our patients and visitors are like guests in our home. Currently on a journey to receive the prestigious Magnet designation in nursing excellence, Baxter Regional is committed to remaining a comprehensive, independent, community-driven health system.

Baxter Regional was named one of the Best Places to Work in Arkansas in 2019 and 2020 and has won spots in the Top 10 Hospitals in Arkansas for Nurses and Top 20 Rural and Community Hospitals in the U.S. With more than 30 clinics and off-site services across an 11-county service area in northern Arkansas and southern Missouri, Baxter Regional provides a variety of specialties including behavioral health, cardiology, gastroenterology, nephrology, neurosurgery, oncology, orthopaedics, pulmonology, urology and women’s health. Other medical services include acute inpatient rehabilitation, pain management, daVinci® robotic surgery and more.

Opportunities await! For more information about joining the Baxter Regional family, visit workwhereyouvacation.com

CARELINK

Helping older people and their families overcome the challenges of aging.

With 10,000 people turning 65 every day in the United States, more people are finding themselves taking on the role of caregiver for an aging family member. CareLink knows the challenges that come with caregiving, especially for a family member, which is why it strives to alleviate the stress and worry many people experience. Whether it’s assisting with the needs of an older person through Meals on Wheels or allowing a caregiver to focus on their own health needs through respite care and fitness classes, CareLink is here for caregivers and their families.

Headquartered in North Little Rock since 1979, Carelink, Central Arkansas’s Area Agency on Aging, helps older people and their families overcome the challenges of aging by connecting with the older community when and where they need it most.

For more information about helping a family member, call 501-3725300 or visit CareLink.org.

38 MARCH 2021

ARKANSAS TIMES

RHEA DRUG

A pharmacy and a neighborhood gift shop.

After you drop off your prescription, browse for great gifts you won’t find anywhere else: You never know what you’ll find! As a traditional pharmacy since 1922, we take care of all of your prescription needs, including curbside pick-up and delivery. We accept all major insurance coverage and Medicare Part D plans. As a neighborhood gift shop, we have something for everyone. We even throw in free gift wrapping!

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ARKANSAS DERMATOLOGY AND SKIN CANCER CENTER

Providing the highest standard of care available.

Arkansas Dermatology and Skin Cancer Center, with locations in Little Rock, Conway, North Little Rock, Heber Springs, Cabot, Stuttgart, Searcy and Russellville, is committed to providing the highest level of expertise in both general dermatology and the treatment of skin cancer.

Whether we are addressing your skin cancer concerns or informing you of the latest skin care tips, our top priority is to ensure that your experience with our practice is second-to-none. Our talented team of physicians and physician assistants recognize that every patient has different needs, and we pride ourselves in the courteous service we deliver to each person who walks through our doors. With a wide range of medical and cosmetic dermatology procedures delivered by a team of skilled and experienced professionals, our patients can be confident they are receiving the highest standard of care available.

We are committed to patient education and will take the time necessary to ensure you are thoroughly informed of your treatment/procedure details and the results that can be expected. We work together to provide quality care for our patients. Your skin deserves the best, and we thank you for choosing us to keep your skin healthy and beautiful for years to come! For more information, go to arkansasdermatology.com.

Coronavirus Also Affects Minds That’s why we are available anytime from anywhere, offering all our services in the safest possible manner – Telehealth for: • Outpatient and school-based counseling • Kaleidoscope Grief Center support • Methodist Behavioral Hospital physician services, family therapy, visitation through Arkansas Division of Child and Family Services, and court appearances • In-person psychiatric testing with plexiglass screen and PPE Call 877-778-1197 info@MethodistFamily.org ARKANSASTIMES.COM

MARCH 2021 39

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UAMS BREAST CENTER

Offers peace of mind with same-day mammogram results.

At the UAMS Breast Center, health care providers and staff provide high-quality, state-of-the-art medical care with top-notch customer service.

Prompt results are an important part of each patient’s care at the Breast Center in the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute.

“We know that getting a mammogram can be a stressful time,” said Gwendolyn Bryant-Smith, M.D., director of the UAMS Division of Breast Imaging. “We know that prompt results can ease that anxiety, which is why we offer sameday results for both screening and diagnostic mammograms.”

Many centers offer same-day results for women who undergo a diagnostic mammogram for a potential problem, but very few offer that quick turnaround for annual screenings.

“We believe it is important to give all women the peace of mind that comes with same-day results. It is truly something that sets us apart from the rest,” she said.

This spring, the UAMS Breast Center will be moving to a beautiful new facility on the third floor of the Cancer Institute that boasts natural light and comfortable surroundings, according toBryant-Smith, who also serves as the program director of the UAMS Breast Imaging Fellowship.

This expanded facility will house two more mammography units and three new ultrasound machines, for a total of five each. The center will also feature an MRI dedicated solely for breast imaging.

“We are so excited to welcome women to our new facility,” she said. “I believe our patients are going to enjoy all of the amenities, including large dressing rooms and a coffee bar, we can provide in our new space. And, of course, 40 MARCH 2021

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our patients will still receive the highest quality breast care services available.”

The Breast Center expansion isn’t the only growth at the Cancer Institute. In November, UAMS opened a new infusion center for patients with blood cancers. Arkansas’s first Phase 1 Cancer Clinical Trial Unit also is part of the center, allowing patients access to clinical trials unavailable elsewhere in the state.

The American College of Radiology named the center as a Breast Center of Excellence, a prestigious recognition that includes mandatory accreditation in mammography and also voluntary accreditations in stereotactic core biopsy, ultrasound, ultrasound-guided biopsy and breast MRI. In addition to Bryant-Smith, the Breast Center’s radiologists are Scott Harter, M.D., and breast fellow Patrick Jennings, M.D., who will remain at UAMS upon completing his fellowship in July. Also that month, radiologist Rachel Taylor, M.D., is slated to join the Breast Center.

If a woman’s annual screening shows a need for more care, the center’s radiologists work with UAMS breast surgeons, led by Chief of Breast Oncology Ronda Henry-Tillman, M.D., medical oncologists, radiation oncologists, pathologists, social workers and other health care providers in the Cancer Institute to develop a team-approached plan for individualized care.

“Patients really benefit from our interdisciplinary team, which meets weekly to discuss each patient’s case,” Bryant-Smith said. “We are committed to ensuring every patient gets the individualized care they need and deserve.”

To make an appointment at the UAMS Breast Center, call 501-526-6100. Evening and weekend appointments are available.

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METHODIST FAMILY HEALTH

Helping rebuild the lives of Arkansas children and families.

Since 1899, when we began our legacy of care as the Arkansas Methodist Orphanage, Methodist Family Health has helped rebuild the lives of Arkansas children and families who have been abandoned, abused, neglected and struggling with psychiatric, behavioral, emotional and spiritual issues.

Today, Methodist Family Health’s continuum of care includes the Methodist Behavioral Hospital in Maumelle; psychiatric residential treatment centers in Bono and Little Rock; qualified residential treatment program homes throughout the state; therapeutic day treatment program in Little Rock; Arkansas Center for Addictions Research, Education and Services (Arkansas CARES) in Little Rock; community- and school-based counseling clinics throughout the state; and the Kaleidoscope Grief Center, which is focused on helping grieving children and their families. Our mission is to provide the best possible care to those who may need it. If you or someone you know needs help, call us at 866-813-3388, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, email Info@MethodistFamily.org or visit MethodistFamily.org

BLUE YOGA NYLA

Find relief through yoga therapy.

The practice of yoga is the integration of the mind, body and spirit. Yoga therapy is a personal journey targeting specific areas of illness, injury and disease in the body, mind and spirit. Our story, our past, our pain and our wounds lead us where we stand today.

Through this process we will be able to identify how our pain and past dwell in our being as manifestations of anxiety, depression and disease.

Stacey Reynolds is a yoga therapist and president/owner of Blue Yoga Nyla. Her 20-plus years of experience as a yoga therapist enables her to offer a unique, personalized approach in guiding students through the healing process. With her extensive knowledge of the chakra system and subtle body, her work allows for the release of long-held shadow debris.

Sometimes we are unable to identify what is causing a sense of discomfort. We know something is not quite right but cannot identify a cause. Unaddressed tension and stress can lead to illness, disease, anxiety, depression, chronic fatigue and spiritual disconnect.

Yoga therapy allows individuals to investigate, uncover, discover and discard while working with their own unique story.

Stacey specializes in trauma, grief and addiction. Email blueyoganyla@gmail.com for a yoga therapy information packet and scheduling.

STAY

informed

CareLink’s Information & Assitance specialists have been sharing invaluable resources with older people and their families since 1979.

Services like Meals on Wheels, in-home care, family caregiver support, and Urgent Needs (to name a few) help Central Arkansas’s aging Arkansans stay safe in their homes.

Call CareLink Information & Assistance at (501) 372-5300 or toll-free at (800) 482-6359 so we can be there when you need us.

501.372.5300 | CareLink.org ARKANSASTIMES.COM

MARCH 2021 41

IN THE 2019-2020 SCHOOL YEAR, the Pulaski County Special School District implemented AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination) across all elementary schools and sixth and ninth grades. AVID increases student engagement while activating a deeper level of learning. This initiative emphasizes rigorous coursework and relationships.

Deborah Grimmett, AVID coordinator at Joe T. Robinson Middle School, has seen the program grow despite the ongoing adjustments caused by COVID-19 as the district aims to reach both traditional and virtual students.

“As an AVID teacher,” said Grimmett, “I get the opportunity to connect with students on a higher level.

When they have challenges in their lives - at home, with friends, or at school - AVID is often the first place they turn. Students have increased their grades in all classes, improved attendance, and become more active in their own learning!”

2018-2019 SCHOOL YEAR

Students are also seeing a difference.

Sebastian Young: I joined AVID because I felt that I am not good at organization. I have gotten better at organization. It has helped with getting my work turned in. AVID is hard work but it’s going to pay off.

Jordyn Barnes: I think one of the biggest changes I’ve made is focusing more on my work and that has helped my grades this year. AVID is really fun, we play games and do a lot of group activities. If I could tell someone something about joining AVID it would be that some things will be hard but you won’t regret it.

Emily Martin: I’ve become more organized and am finishing work on time. If you need help getting your schedule together, AVID is for you. It helps you become more organized and used to doing the extra work.

AVID introduces and encourages continued education. Grimmett says her middle school students have researched colleges and had virtual guest speakers.

The class has built their eBinders and learned how to use Google Sites to stay organized.

ABOUT PCSSD

Pulaski County Special School District spans more than 600 square miles in central Arkansas and requires highly skilled and passionate personnel to adapt educational policies and personalization to 25 schools. Every school is accredited by the Arkansas State Board of Education. PCSSD has served schools across Pulaski County since July 1927.

PCSSD is committed to creating a nationally recognized school district that assures that all students achieve at their maximum potential through collaborative, supportive and continuous efforts of all stakeholders.

REGISTER NOW

pcssd.org/register 501.234.2000 42 MARCH 2021

ARKANSAS TIMES

PHOTO BY MARK MATHEWS

News & Notes 44 | Spring Break pg 48 | Meet the Parent pg 51

SPRING BREAK

IS ON

THIS YEAR, THINK SMALL. ARKANSASTIMES.COM

MARCH 2021 43

NEWS & NOTES BACK AT THE RANCH

March 10

On National Ranch Day you can eat as much Ranch as you want with impunity — and without judgement. Go ahead, just put it on everything. It’s time to honor the beloved condiment and American staple long credited with getting kids to eat their vegetables.

GO GREEN

March 17

Who wouldn’t love Tree? With a big, swoopy tail and a friendly face for all the dogs in his rescue, this real-life Treeing Walker hound is a special dog in a special place.

It’s the one day on the calendar that everyone gets to claim Irish heritage. No parades this year, but you can still get into the spirit with crafts, food and fun (and, according to my kids, the Lucky Charms — the forbidden fruit). Make it easy on yourself and recycle that “Green Eggs and Ham” recipe you made for Dr. Seuss’ birthday. Originally a religious feast day commemorating the famed Irish patron saint who brought Christianity to Ireland, St. Patrick’s Day is celebrated in more countries around the world than any other single-day national festival.

COLOR ME HAPPY

March 31

Coronavirus Also Affects Minds That’s why we are available anytime from anywhere, offering all our services in the safest possible manner – from telehealth to in-person psychiatric testing with plexiglass screen and PPE

Call 877-778-1197

info@MethodistFamily.org

The crayon inspires nostalgia — the brilliant colors, the distinct smell, the waxy texture.

Celebrate National Crayon Day with two of our favorite books: Oliver Jeffers’ playful and witty “The Day the Crayons Quit” and “The Day the Crayons Came Home.” Fun fact: More than 12 million crayons are made daily.

Fun craft: Don’t know what to do with the 12 million broken crayon pieces in your house? Use them to make new ones!

Simply preheat the oven to 150 degrees, fill a muffin tin with crayon pieces, and bake just until the wax melts, probably about 15 to 20 minutes. Remove the shapes after they have cooled. Even the least crafty among us is sure of success.

SAVVY kids PUBLISHER BROOKE WALLACE | brooke@arktimes.com

EDITOR KATHERINE WYRICK | katherinewyrick@arktimes.com SENIOR ACCOUNT EXECUTIVE LESA THOMAS ART DIRECTOR KATIE HASSELL

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ARKANSAS TIMES

MARCH BOOK RELEASES

Local Et Alia Press has two children’s books out this month, adding to their already impressive lineup:

“CARTWHEELS: FINDING YOUR SPECIAL KIND OF SMART”

Based on the real-life teacher/student relationship between veteran teacher and author Tracy Peterson and student Sloane LaFrance, “Cartwheels” tells the story of a lively, creative first-grader who struggles with reading. Peterson hopes her book will open up a conversation about learning differences and explain the basics of dyslexia to children. Available March 9.

FROM COTTON TO SILK: THE MAGIC OF BLACK HAIR

Crystal C. Mercer’s “From Cotton to Silk” chronicles the tale of two sisters, Gisele and Elise, and their love for their hair in its natural state. This ode to cultural beauty encourages girls everywhere to love themselves just the way they are. Its enchanting pages reveal hundreds of hours of hand-stitching — 467 to be exact — poured into “textile renderings that blend cloth, culture, and the superpowers of the kinky, curly coif.” The idea for the book came during Mercer’s time living in Accra, Ghana. Available March 20. (Check Stephanie Smittle’s Jan. 26 interview with the author at arktimes. com.)

ONGOING HAPPENINGS AT CALS

Tips for More Fun and Fewer Fights

Join the Central Arkansas Library System at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 9, for Cooking Matters at Home: Kids Say Yes to Fruits and Veggies. Learn how to prepare delicious, affordable meals the whole family will enjoy. In each 30-minute group discussion, they’ll talk about different ideas for saving money while cooking tasty family meals. This online series will be held over Zoom, so you will need either a stable internet or phone connection.

Also check out Nature Quest at the Hillary Rodham Clinton Children’s Library and Learning Center. This program offers kids the chance to go on a nature-themed scavenger hunt at any time during the month. Get the first clue from the front desk from 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Monday through Saturday and take back the code word for a prize! A new hunt occurs around the beginning of each month.

Great Things STILL Happening at LRSD

Building STRONG SCHOOLS and Even STRONGER COMMUNITIES

OPTIONS TO MEET EVERY NEED

Dedicated early open enrollment period has ended, but it is never too late to join the LRSD family.

Visit: LRSD.org – Student Registration (K-12) or LRSD.org/earlychildhood (Pre-K) Great THINGS are still happening at LRSD! The Little Rock School District is proud of its 3,500 dedicated professionals who remain committed to meeting the needs of each student, even during a pandemic.

From rigorous academic engagement for those identified as gifted and talented to support for those facing learning, speech or physical challenges, LRSD — the state’s second largest district — offers unique, comprehensive educational approaches for pre-K to 12th-grade students.

LRSD takes pride in its highly qualified teachers — nearly half of all classroom teachers have a masters or doctoral degree and 155 have National Board Certification — among the most in the state. LRSD continues to operate the state’s only K-8 STEM campus, eight magnet schools and a uniquely-focused language and literacy elementary academy, and last year, continued to expand Little Rock West High School of Innovation, adding a 10th grade class. Subsequent grades will be added each year for a 9-12 delivery.

Little Rock Hall STEAM Academy was also introduced, enhancing its focus on science and engineering academies under the Academies of Central Arkansas (Ford NGL) umbrella. High school college preparatory programs, including pre-AP, AP, classes with local universities and the District’s

EXCEL program, provide multiple options for families. These programs allow students to align their educational experience with their interests, preparing them for college and career and equipping them to meet the challenges of a global society.

LRSD consistently places among the top tier of state schools with National Merit Semifinalists, as well as Commended, National Hispanic and AP Scholars.

LRSD is proud of its highly accomplished students and the community partnerships that enhance their educational experiences.

Students will continue taking their learning to the next level at the newly constructed career-focused Little Rock Southwest High School.

LRSD is also the state’s largest provider of public preschool programs with certified teachers in every class. The District’s pre-K students continue to outperform students who do not use LRSD’s pre-K program in every skill area. The District maintains its mission to provide students with equitable access to educational opportunities, equipping them with what they need to succeed.

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MARCH 2021 45

the project prevent

s n o i s s i m sub epted acc 1 1 y r a u Jan - to 1 2 0 2 , 9 l Apri

Arkansas students in grades K-3 can create artwork to help others REACH the truth about smoking, dipping or vaping.

to learn more, visit projectpreventar.org and follow us on social media @projectpreventar.

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ARKANSAS TIMES

youth coalition presents

Arkansas students in grades 4-6 can write an essay to REACH family and friends to help them quit tobacco or REACH the truth about e-cigarettes and vaping.

REACH!

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MARCH 2021 47

SPRING BREAK IS ON

This year, think small.

BY KATHERINE WYRICK

PHOTO BY MARK MATHEWS

N

o one has ever sighed in exasperation, “Ugh! I need a staycation!” But, yet, here we are. It’s hard to get excited about staying home when we’ve had to do just that for a year. Spring break is still happening. But what will it look like?

You may think that over the past 12 months (or is it years?), you’ve exhausted all possibilities for fun at home. You’ve left no craft undone, no picture book unread, no game unplayed. And now you find yourself faced with how to fill the hours during a week off of school.

With travel restrictions still in place, we suggest thinking close to home and small. So this spring break, we’re embracing the “microadventure.” It’s a term that my husband claims to have coined but was actually popularized by British author Alastair Humphreys. Defined as an adventure that is “short, simple, local, cheap yet still fun, exciting, challenging, refreshing and rewarding,” the microadventure requires a shift in perspective — and some creativity. Here, we share some ideas:

PARKS, PRESERVES AND MORE

The Nature Conservancy’s preserves are easily accessible, invaluable resources, and we’re so grateful to have them. Devan Schlaudraff, conservation leadership development program manager at TNC, is offering a very cool camp (see below for details), but you can go it alone and visit TNC’s preserves yourself anytime.

Take one of the two canoes provided for free at William Kirsch Preserve within Ranch North Woods (a.k.a. The Ranch) and head out for a paddle on the Little Maumelle. You may spot a leggy heron picking its way through cypress knees and hear the breeze whisper through the reeds. Is that a vole rustling in the thicket?

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ARKANSAS TIMES

And, oh, look at those cute turtles sunning themselves on that log! The Ranch really is an oasis.

Rattlesnake Ridge Natural Area, another TNC property near Pinnacle, has a new driveway, well-maintained paths and newly installed maps to make hiking easy. The unspoiled, sweeping views at the top of the ridge aren’t so bad either.

Word has it that a new TNC trail is in the works, but no details yet.

STATE AND CITY PARKS Forgo the often congested West Summit Trail, and opt for one of the new Monument Trails at Pinnacle Mountain State Park. Then head to the Visitor Center and make use of that quaint paddle boat for a delightful outing on the little pond.

Visit Toltec Mounds Archeological State Park in Scott. This site was a ceremonial ground for prehistoric Native Americans and stands today as an important and fascinating piece of history. You’ll feel compelled to climb on them, but DON’T. Since you’re out that way, swing by Charlotte’s Eats and Sweets in Keo to pick up a slice of their toothsome pie.

Go for a stroll at the Little Rock Audubon Center (4500 Springer Blvd.) and enjoy a scenic view of the city from the southeast. Where else will you find a nepheline syenite glade? (Hint: NOWHERE. It’s a rare ecosystem unique to Pulaski and Saline counties, and there is ONE THERE. It doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world! How amazing is that?) The Little Rock Audubon Center protects two of these rare glades and the plants and animals that live there. The 1-mile loop winds through oak savannah habitat and has a picnic area, firepit and benches. There’s also a pollinator garden, rain garden, vernal pool, Chimney Swift towers, bat boxes and diverse nesting boxes. Don’t know what these things are? Go find out!

Note: The Center itself is closed to the public and all in-person programming is suspended, but the trails are open from sunrise to sunset daily.

Ride a bike at Two Rivers or about town. Can’t afford a bike? Get a free one at the laudable organization Recycle Bikes for Kids. Not confident in your bike-riding skills or need a little boost? Rent an electric one at Pedego on Kavanaugh. You can also rent regular bikes (and kayaks) at Rock Town River Outfitters in Little Rock and jump on the trail (or in the water) right then and there.

Recent improvements at Reservoir Park have made this our park of choice these days. It’s rarely too crowded, the playground equipment is clean and new and there’s room for spreading out and exploring. You feel miles away from the traffic on Cantrell Road.

For the sporty, there’s also a disc golf course, tennis and basketball courts, and a softball field.

A little further afield, take a half-day trip to Garvan Woodland Gardens where the Tulip Extravaganza should be hitting its stride with its more than 150,000 breathtaking flowers, March 1-April 30.

For updates on peak bloom times, visit garvangardens.org.

THE BACKYARD CAMPOUT

LEVEL UP YOUR BACKYARD CAMPOUT WITH THESE ITEMS & ACTIVITIES!

Marshmallow Crossbow

Let’s break this thing down:

Pitch a tent, not a fit! Don’t have a tent? Inexpensive ones at big chains average around $40 for one that sleeps 1-4. After setting it up, set the scene: Artfully arrange some camping chairs around a fire or camping stove; Hang twinkle lights for instant atmosphere; Add an aesthetically pleasing retro lantern and Sherpa Puffy Blanket (RUMPL) from Domestic Domestic; hang a hammock (the Wise Owl Outfitters one is our favorite). You’ve just made camp!

Create some movie magic. To take things to the next level, make it a movie night by turning an old white bedsheet or canvas drop cloth into a big screen.

Play games. Cornhole, anyone? Flashlight tag is also fun because it’s like hide-and-seek but in the dark. (Tip: Glow stick bracelets make the finding a little easier.) Domestic Domestic also has games like Outdoor Bingo and Match a Leaf (a tree memory game), as well as toys like a marshmallow crossbow (!), smashable geode kit and bendable Bigfoot to add to the fun. Because what’s a campout without a Bigfoot sighting, right?

Stargaze. Even if you don’t have a telescope, there are plenty of apps that will help you identify what’s happening in the night sky above you. (We like Night Sky for iPhone.) Sometimes, the International Space Station even comes into view, and you can spot it with the naked eye.

Light a fire. If you don’t have a firepit, there are alternatives.

My husband made an unsightly “rustic” one from a galvanized metal utility tub he got at Kraftco. We just discovered the OneLogFire, handmade in Minnesota (where they know about these things). It’s a fire log that burns from the inside out for up to two hours and is super easy to light. You can find one at The Toggery.

Treat yourselves. It goes without saying that s’mores are a must. We just picked up this retractable marshmallow stick at Box Turtle. Too messy? Opt for s’more dip, a family favorite and crowdpleaser. Simply place broken Hershey bars in a pie dish or skillet, add marshmallows on top and brown under the broiler for a minute or two. Serve with graham cracker sticks. This is a tidier alternative and easier for little kids.

(Products mentioned can be found in the the sidebar .)

Smashable Geode Kit What’s a campout without a Bigfoot sighting?

Products available at Domestic Domestic, Toggery or Box Turtle.

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MARCH 2021 49

ASPIRATIONAL TRAVEL The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still recommends avoiding all nonessential travel, but a girl can dream, can’t she? It’s really a matter of when, not if, travel will open up again. Having a travel adviser will be more important than ever when that time comes. Poe Travel is already booking trips for late 2021 and well into 2022.

The following Q&A with Ellison Poe, president of Poe Travel, has got us daydreaming about future plans.

Any predictions about what the hot family destinations will be postall-of-this? Galapagos, Sea of Cortez, East African Safari and New Zealand.

These places have long been, and will continue to be, great for families.

Describe a memorable trip you’ve taken with your daughter.

I took Jane to India when she was 11 years old ... a smorgasbord of all the senses ... sacred cows wandering the streets, chaotic traffic, bodies burning in the Ganges in Varanasi, Taj Mahal at sunrise, getting our hands painted with henna, amazing food, trying on huge, real jewels.

Please share any popular spring break ideas of yore.

Montana; Charleston, S.C.; Savannah, Ga.; and Marfa, Texas, for the art and landscape.

Any spring break memories of your own you’d like to share?

Ballyfin, a fabulous early 19th century house in Ireland, where you get to wear period costumes at dinner.

What’s a unique experience you’ve arranged for a family with younger kids? Having the actors who played the Von Trapps in “The Sound of Music” singing when the family got off the plane in Salzburg.

Rise.

When life is weighing you down, we are here to help you

Our Team offers:

Individual & Family Counseling ASD Testing Learning Disability Testing ADHD Testing Contact us Today to

Find a Location Near You Arkadelphia | Benton | Conway Little Rock | North Little Rock | Sherwood 501.891.5492 RiseforFamilies.com

50 MARCH 2021

ARKANSAS TIMES

CAMPS

The Nature Conservancy is hosting a Spring Break Adventure Day Camp for ninth and 10th-grade students March 22-26.

Activities include hiking in the Ouachitas, rock climbing, fishing, archery and trap shooting, axe throwing, paddling in the Delta and more. The group will travel around Central Arkansas to experience outdoor recreation at its best. No experience is needed. The maximum number of participants is eight, with two leaders. All COVID-19 safety protocols will be followed, and all participants must present a negative COVID-19 test taken between March 1721. Gear and food will be provided; leaders and students will be transported together. Participants will receive daily instructions on what to bring. Drop-off (8 a.m.) and pickup (5 p.m.) at The Nature Conservancy, 601 N. University Ave, Suite 2. For more information or to sign up, contact Devan Mayer at devan.mayer@ tnc.org. The deadline is March 9, cost is $50.

We asked Devan why she thinks it’s important for kids to connect with nature, and she had this to say: “Nature is healing! Nature is fun!

Nature allows you to slow down, calm down or challenge yourself.

Whatever you’re looking for, nature can most likely provide what you need. Outdoor recreation offers incredible opportunities for youths to experience nature in an exciting and active way. If kids learn different outdoor recreation skills, then they have a way to connect with nature for their lives. You don’t need to be an expert to enjoy the benefits.

You just need enough courage to learn the basic skills and grow from there. That’s what I want to achieve during the Spring Break Day Camp. The camp is designed to accommodate all experience levels, especially beginners. Hopefully throughout the week, everyone can find an activity that resonates with them.”

Pre-pandemic, our family went on a TNC canoe outing with Devan and other families to Electric Island on Lake Hamilton. We loved it.

Our 8-year-old son said of the experience, “It was rather windy, but it was peaceful and fun and exciting. The swimming was the best.”

Junior Naturalist Camp, led by Central Arkansas Master Naturalists at Wildwood Park for the Arts Day Camp, for ages 7-11, runs March 22-26 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. each day, with drop-off beginning at 8:45 a.m. and pickup lasting until 4:30 p.m. Bill Toland, a certified Arkansas Master Naturalist and an NAI Certified Interpretive Guide, leads the naturalist programming with additional certified Central Arkansas Master Naturalists.

Campers will hike Wildwood’s winding trails, play outdoor games and engage in hands-on instruction in lake ecology, reptiles and insects native to Arkansas and how to stay safe in the woods.

LIVIN’ THAT RV LIFE

RV travel really falls into the macro-adventure category but warrants a mention because it has become so wildly popular during the pandemic. This is because it allows families to remain safely in their bubbles when away from home, therefore minimizing risk. And with more parents and kids working and schooling online, normally time-crunched families are taking advantage of the opportunity to travel without worrying about vacation days. Huddleston RV Rentals in Hot Springs is one local outfitter, and they offer a 10% discount to military, first responders and teachers.

Of course, The Natural State has an abundance of parks to explore via RV. A less expensive option? Convert your minivan into a camper.

That can mean something as simple as putting a full-sized mattress in the back of your van or creating a fully tricked-out version.

So, during this spring break like no other, take time to rediscover your surroundings. You might be surprised what you find.

Meet the Parent:

HENRY MURPHY

Henry Murphy is the development and special projects coordinator at Youth Home Inc., father of Niko and husband of Lauren, an ER nurse. Here, this devoted dad shares a thoughtful — and practical — take on parenting and how his family finds balance and joy.

How do you and Lauren balance work and family (and online school if that’s what’s happening at your house)?

I was a stay-at-home husband — usually I just refer to myself as a housewife — for several years, so I understand the work that goes into being a homemaker.

Trying to do all the things you think are important requires a committed partner, someone who can pick up your slack or forgive your failings. And everyone needs downtime, free time, self-care time. We are good at appreciating each other, and my wife says that is a choice we make every day.

Our son and nephew participate in virtual school from our house even though they’re from two different districts. Lauren and I are extremely fortunate.

Our workplaces are flexible enough that we can take care of that. I cannot imagine working somewhere that doesn’t allow this flexibility. The work/home environment since last March has been demanding enough, even with the advantages we have.

Any favorite father-son activities?

Niko is a member of Scouts Pack 30, and I love making him participate in every variety of activity, so he has real childhood experiences, i.e. is forced to do things he can’t fully appreciate the value of at the time. We like to play chess and board games (shout out to Game Goblins on Bowman) and video games with Lauren and our nephew. One of our favorite things is — or was — sliding on cardboard at the Clinton Library. We also like just exploring almost anything — a department store, a city park, a corner of the Buffalo River, a new restaurant menu.

FAMILY MAN EXTRAORDINAIRE, HENRY MURPHY RELISHES HIS ROLES AS HUSBAND OF HIGHS CHOOL SWEETHEART LAUREN AND DEVOTED DAD OF NIKO, 11. THEY ALL ENJOY ADVENTURING AND SPENDING TIME TOGETHER WHETHER IT’S A GAME OF CHESS OR A HIKE. HENRY AND NIKO ARE ALSO PROUD MEMBERS OF THE CUB SCOUTS AND PARTICIPATE IN ANY AND ALL SCOUTING ACTIVITIES.

Name three things that are helping your family get through the pandemic.

For getting through the pandemic: video games, family, a schedule or routine, and reading. When the weather is nice we play tennis, bocce, croquet and other yard games after school. Spending time with my wife in a new way, like gardening or trying to learn songs she likes for the guitar. When you actually see people it’s so special, so exciting. Levelized billing for your utilities because staying at home all day gets expensive.

Please share any parenting advice or wisdom you’ve been given over the years that has stuck with you.

It sounds simple, but loving your children above everything may be the best advice. Even very young they will do things that challenge you, and it’s only love that lets you accept that. But I also think that it’s good with every relationship — marriage, parenthood, work — to not take things so personally. People always have their own reasons for doing things that are not necessarily related to you. That is hardest to follow when it comes to your child, I have discovered. I tend to take my relationship with Niko very personally.

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CULTURE

MACARTHUR PARK REBOOT

A Q&A WITH VICTORIA RAMIREZ OF THE ARKANSAS MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS.

BY STEPHANIE SMITTLE

T

he Arkansas Arts Center has a new name to go with its $142 million new building in MacArthur Park. Now known as the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, the newly glowed-up art museum is slated to open in 2022, housing under one roof a restaurant, an art school, gallery space, a museum store and performing arts spaces for its acclaimed children’s theater and other groups. Architecture firm Studio Gang, founded by MacArthur genius grant award winner Jeanne Gang, designed the new building. The concept adds a sweeping glass-paneled “cultural living room” and simultaneously nods to the building’s history by uncovering and spotlighting an Art Deco facade from 1937, part of the original museum entrance. We talked with Executive Director Victoria Ramirez about the renovation and what it means for art in Arkansas.

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ARKANSAS ARTS CENTER, TRANSFORMED: Like its new name, the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts’ new building nods to its 1930s origins.

Kelley

ement Procur

HERstory:

CELEBRATING WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH

During Women’s History Month, we celebrate our Women of Water (WoW), for the role they play in the water reclamation processes that help Little Rock thrive! We recognize women like Kelley, Procurement Coordinator, who manages the policies and processes that allow businesses nationwide to help us protect public health and the environment our residents enjoy.

Learn more about our Women of Water, their positions and our diverse people and processes at lrwra.com/wow.

STUDIO GANG

+

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RIVERFRONT RIVERFRONT

SSteakhouse Steakhouse teakhouse

So, Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts is the museum’s new name, but it’s also a bit of a return, right? When it was established in the ’30s, it was called the Museum of Fine Arts before it was the Arkansas Arts Center.

Yes! So in 1937, one of the buildings at Serving Dinner MacArthur Park opened, and in fact, that Serving Dinner5 pm - 9:30 pm Monday-Thursday facade is part of the plan for the new building.

Friday & Saturday pm - pm 10 pm It’s our north entrance, and it prominently says Serving Monday-Thursday 5 pm Dinner - 59:30 “Museum of Fine Arts.” It wasn’t until 1960 that Monday-Thursday 5 pm 9:30 pm Friday & Saturday 5 pm - Friday, 10 pmSaturday Hours: Thursday, the name was changed to Arkansas Arts Center.

Friday & Saturday 5 pm 10 pm 5:00pm-8:30pm You know, we hadn’t really started this project thinking, “Let’s change the name.” It was more www.Riverfront-Steakhouse.com like, “Well, we’re looking at everything, Does the name still suit us?”

Located in the Wyndham Hotel 2 Riverfront Place, North Little Rock, AR 501 375 7825 And as I understand it, it was Governor Rockefeller who said that the name should in the Wyndham 2 Riverfront Place, NorthLittle Little Rock, Rock, AR 375375 7825 ocated in Located the Wyndham Hotel Hotel 2 Riverfront Place, North AR501 501 7825 always have “Arkansas” in it.

RIVERFRONT

OPEN FOR DINE-IN

www.Riverfront-Steakhouse.com

www.Riverfront-Steakhouse.com www.Riverfront-Steakhouse.com

LITTLE ROCK WATER RECLAMATION AUTHORITY

HERSTORY: CELEBRATING WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH March is Women’s History Month, and in celebration of the indelible contributions women have made to history, Little Rock Water Reclamation Authority (LRWRA) is celebrating just a few of the talented women whose skills and dedication contribute to the work we do to help our city thrive. We salute the honorees for our third “Women of Water” (WoW) Campaign as we present “HERStory: Celebrating Women’s History Month.”

This year, we recognize Ganelle who serves as our Little Rock Water Reclamation Commission Chair, Kelley who works in our procurement department, Kenetta who works to educate taxpayers about our commitment to community, Brenda who works in dispatch, and Ashley an operator at one of our treatment facilities who works to reclaim water safely through our environmentally friendly processes. We share their stories for all that they do to help us honor our mission “to protect public health and the environment while leading and serving our community today and reclaiming water for a more sustainable tomorrow.”

“HERStory is our way of recognizing the important contributions of women to what we do daily, and the contributions of women to all areas of society throughout history,” said Greg Ramon, CEO at LRWRA. “We are committed to supporting inclusive efforts that recruit more women into our industry and to showing our appreciation for those who work alongside us each day.”

Learn more about this year’s “Women of Water,” and their daily contributions that help preserve our city’s quality of life and support its growth. Visit lrwra.com/wow to read their stories.

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When is the opening?

I would guess late spring, early summer of 2022. ... There’s still much work to be done. We have to acclimate all of the art to the new space. We have to run systems for three months to make sure everything is running properly, and we will be moving into a building that is still very much being worked on by our contractors and subcontractors. That’s why we’re taking a little bit of time to open — to get the restaurant running, to get the store and the art school running. Oh, I just realized we have to install all those kilns! Yeah. We have a lot of work to do.

You’ve increased the fundraising goal from $128 million to $142 million. What changes from your initial planning can we expect to see with that additional funding?

The main thing that any museum or cultural organization wants to do is make sure that they have as much square footage as possible available to the public. So, as we’ve scrutinized the plans for the building, we’ve added a little over 1,000 extra feet of gallery space. That means more art and more space for the public to enjoy.

There was a corridor in the main section of the art school, and we looked at it and said, “Well, that’s kind of wasted space.” So we turned that into a gallery. We had what was originally a behind-the-scenes black box rehearsal space that needed some love and attention, and we started to realize that with this increased goal, we could not only activate this space, but could provide significant programming there. And we’re calling it the Glass Box, because rather than being a dark space, it’s really gonna be a light-filled space. It was well worth it. It’s one of those things where, if you don’t do it now, you’ll never do it.

The third big thing we did is we increased the landscaping. The landscaping hovered under 10 acres, then around 10 acres, now it’s closer to 13 acres that we are tending to. Some of it is plants and an intentional plan, and other sections of the landscaping we’re just leaving open for programming and event space. You know, if

a Brend STUDIO GANG

ch Dispat

GLASS BOX: The museum’s design trades a black box theater for a “light-filled space.”

HERstory:

CELEBRATING WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH

you’re gonna have a big outdoor festival, you want a big open space to do that. We realized that with a little more investment we could get a lot more bang for our buck.

The cool thing is, all of our investments are things people will see. It’s not like when you own your house and you have to replace the gutters. These are really cool projects that will improve the building for museum guests.

What sort of personality does the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts have in a state that also happens to be home to a museum like Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art? Here’s the thing. Even before I had arrived in Arkansas, I had visited Crystal Bridges.

Everybody in the museum world — and I have been in the museum world for decades — knew and knows about Crystal Bridges, because what they’re doing is just extraordinary. The collection that they have created, the programming, the commitment to Northwest Arkansas — and just their convictions — are to be applauded. They are, in many ways, leading the museum field in some of those efforts. I think that what we will be doing in Central Arkansas will reflect that and complement it. First, Crystal Bridges collects American art, and we collect more than that. Our collection is global, and we look to tell multicultural and global stories with our collections. I also think we have areas of strength in craft and in works on paper, and that includes not only national and international artists, but it includes regional artists, too. To

be able to show art to people that was made in your region, in your country and in the world, side by side, creates an interesting and unique experience.

One other aspect that distinguishes us is our art school. We have an art school with 10 or so studios equipped for a variety of media far beyond what most museums offer. I don’t know many museums that have such a robust ceramics program, along with a woodworking program, and glass and metal. Drawing, painting, printmaking. I think that approach of showing people art, and then showing people how to make art, makes us really unique. And then, of course, the performing side of it is also just really special. We’ll have a variety of spaces where we can show performance arts programs, including children’s theater. We’re looking to expand those programs, and we’re talking with potential partners in dance and film and live music. We really want the new museum to sort of take everything that we’ve done before and amplify it.

You’ve committed to keeping admission free. Is that for the whole facility? For the exhibitions as well?

Yes. At least for the first few years, we’ll have free, nonticketed exhibitions. That’s part of our commitment to the community. Certainly there will be performances and classes and those kinds of experiences where we will charge, but we really do our best to keep those costs minimal.

During Women’s History Month, we celebrate our Women of Water (WoW), for the role they play in the water reclamation processes that help Little Rock thrive!

We recognize women like Brenda, Dispatcher, who is dedicated to addressing LRWRA customer questions, concerns—and even complaints —with the exceptional service we take pride in.

Learn more about our Women of Water, their positions and our diverse people and processes at lrwra.com/wow.

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FOOD& DRINK

COFFEE DELIVERED

ARKANSAS ROASTERS TURN TO E-COMMERCE TO KEEP PEOPLE CAFFEINATED AMID THE PANDEMIC.

BY RHETT BRINKLEY PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRIAN CHILSON

I

t used to be, back in the pre-pandemic days, that Arkansas’s coffee shops buzzed with long lines and full tables. The coronavirus pandemic changed all that. We’re a year in on masks and social distancing, but walking into a popular coffee shop at peak hours and finding only a few customers still feels like “The Twilight Zone.” The pandemic hit the downtown Little Rock coffee scene particularly hard. Zeteo Coffee’s River Market location closed in July. Blue Sail Coffee recently announced it will no longer operate out of the Little Rock Technology Park on Main Street. Zeteo Coffee and Blue Sail Coffee’s Conway locations both remain open. People haven’t stopped drinking coffee, but the way people consume it is changing. If you look around your Zoom meeting, most of the coffee you’ll see is home-brewed. Personally, I’ve been brewing large pots of drip coffee and not leaving the house for days at a time. And I didn’t even have a drip

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brewer before the pandemic.

Many industries have had to pivot and coffee is no different. Roasters are exploring the avenues of e-commerce by offering online merchandise, coffee shipping and subscription services. As coffee shops close for lack of in-person customers, the Arkansas roasters who send their beans through the mail are going strong. There’s no shortage of locally roasted, delicious coffee in Arkansas. Roasters that sell online and will ship beans to your door include Brave New Restaurant, Fidel & Co., Doomsday Coffee (Fayetteville), Stirling Roastery (Booneville), Guillermo’s Gourmet Coffee, RoZark Hills Coffee Roastery (Rose Bud) and Big Cuppa Roasting (Morrilton).

Supporting local businesses is more important than ever. Most of us are already drinking coffee; we might as well help our local shops keep their doors open while we do it. We don’t even have to get out of our PJs.

‘STAY CAFFEINATED, MY FRIEND’: For Geovanni Leiva, coffee is synonymous with family.

Ashley tor Opera

LEIVA’S COFFEE Geovanni Leiva, owner of Leiva’s Coffee in North Little Rock, started drinking coffee when he was 18 months old. He grew up on a coffee farm in the mountains of eastern Guatemala.

“My parents gave me coffee in a bottle, which I told them was probably child abuse, but they explained to me that at the farm, drinking coffee was considered a very good thing for a child,” Leiva said. Leiva is understandably affectionate about coffee and ended all of his emails to me with “Stay caffeinated my friend.”

Last March Leiva’s Coffee lost over 80 percent of its income when all the pandemic-related closures began. Leiva’s primarily sells its coffee wholesale and is the main supplier of coffee to the Capital Hotel (which has remained closed) and the Little Rock Athletic Club. It also provides coffee to Dillard’s corporate headquarters and different churches around town. “To be flat honest, we almost died,” Leiva said.

Leiva’s family has been growing coffee in Guatemala for more than 60 years. He moved to the U.S. on a college scholarship with his parents’ life savings of $20, a shoebox of belongings and the clothes on his back.

He spoke no English, but became fluent in eight months and graduated from UA Pulaski Technical College in about 18 months. He became a computer programmer, which he did for 14 years. All along, he kept going back home to Guatemala to visit his family. He came up with idea for Leiva’s Coffee on one of those trips after reading a Chinese proverb that said, “If you give a man a fish you will feed him for a day, but if you teach him how to fish you will feed him for a lifetime.”

Leiva said that is exactly what happened to him. “I was broken out of poverty because of capitalization and education,” he said. “So I was like, ‘Why can’t I do this back home?’ ”

Leiva taught himself to roast coffee by watching instructional videos. “We use a state-of-the-art Diedrich roaster and I’ve been roasting for close to 4,000 hours,” he said.

The coffee Leiva roasts in North Little Rock is harvested by his parents in Guatemala, and some of the proceeds go directly back home to serve the village. Through the nonprofit Lan Vwa, his family helps educate 75 kids in their farmhouse, which now serves as a school.

“We just bought electricity three years ago,” Leiva said. “These are the people I grew up with; these are my friends, my family, my community. We have a great mission. So I knew I had something special, but at the same time, I didn’t want it to just be this cool, warmy-feel story. I wanted it to be an amazing product.”

Leiva’s started offering subscriptions before the pandemic, which helped keep the doors open last spring. “I pivoted and was like, “OK, I gotta go subscription-based,’ ” Leiva said.

“You can pick whatever frequency you want, and we will roast your coffee 38-42 hours prior to delivering it to your door. Our goal is to grow that to about 2,000 people, and we’re way off that. I mean, we only have 200 people total right this second. But during the COVID days, it’s been growing.”

Subscribers save 10% off the retail coffee price and the roast of their choice is delivered in 12-ounce or 5-pound bags of whole bean or ground (drip, medium or extra-fine).

Merchandise and K-cups are also available on Leiva’s online store.

“I think in March or even sooner we’re going to run a promotion that your first bag is going to be free. Then after that, every third or fourth bag is going to be free. So there’s going to be different promotions we are running,” Leiva said.

HERstory:

CELEBRATING WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH

During Women’s History Month, we celebrate our Women of Water (WoW), for the role they play in the water reclamation processes that help Little Rock thrive!

We recognize women like Ashley, Plant Operator, who manages the treatment process that reclaims used water produced throughout the city and returns it to the environment safely.

Learn more about our Women of Water, their positions and our diverse people and processes at lrwra.com/wow.

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COFFEE TO-GO: (Above) Kyle Tabor’s company, Blue Sail Coffee, is in the process of a full e-commerce subscription build-out.

(Below) Arsaga’s, Onyx Coffee Lab and Red Light Roastery are among the roasters who will ship to your doorstep.

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BLUE SAIL COFFEE When Kyle Tabor opened Blue Sail Coffee in Conway in 2014, he was sleeping in the back of the shop to save money. These days, he’s buying coffee 63,000 pounds at a time from Brazilian farmers for the venture.

“It was a very small operation when I first started,” he said.

Since then the company has started roasting, wholesaling, visiting farms and building relationships with farmers.

Blue Sail Coffee is roasted at a facility in North Little Rock and sold in The Green Corner Store, Boulevard Bread Co., Arkansas Whole Foods locations and Target.

“We’re the smallest company I know of that’s inside of Target, which is a pretty big deal for us,” Tabor said.

Last year, Tabor started looking into what it would take for Blue Sail to become an online company.

“Right about then is when COVID hit,” Tabor said. “At that point, it was like, ‘Well, good thing we’ve been thinking about this because now we have no other option.’ So we just doubled down on that.”

Tabor said in a telephone interview Jan. 29 that he had fresh news: As of that day, the Blue Sail location in the Technology Park on Main Street would be officially closing.

“Just due to a couple things COVID-related,” he said. “I mean, everybody’s working [remotely] so there’s not customers for us downtown anymore.”

In a follow-up interview Feb. 24, Tabor said his company’s pivot to e-commerce required more than just making the product available online.

“We are taking a different approach from most companies [and doing] a full e-commerce subscription build-out. Since the last time we talked, I went to Iowa and recruited a business partner to join the team that’s going to run the e-commerce side of things. Next week, I’m going to Costa Rica to buy our first coffee subscription specific coffee. When you get to the level I’m at, relationships are everything. Of course, while I’m down there I’m going to have some fun in jungles, swimming in some waterfalls and

doing some spearfishing in the ocean. That’s the upside of the job, for sure.”

Tabor said that it wasn’t hard to add a subscription option to his company’s website but that to become a subscription company, “Is something entirely different. And when I realized that, we actually went out and raised capital. We raised a quarter of a million in like three months to become a subscription-based company.”

Tabor said they’re still in the construction phase of the online build-out.

“We plan on really making ourselves available as that company at the end of March.” In the meantime, the Conway shop will remain open, and you can subscribe on Blue Sail’s website.

You can choose whatever blend you want and have it delivered every two weeks or monthly.

“We have hundreds of subscribers,” Tabor said. “We’re shipping coffee all over the United States and people seem to really like it,” he said.

Tabor said he and his team are grateful for the wholesale revenue coming in, and they’re taking the pivot to e-commerce very seriously going forward “Because we have to. These cafes that aren’t roasting that didn’t have an online presence prior, this is just so tough, you know?”

ARSAGA’S COFFEE ROASTERS “It’s hard to think of now, but coffee shops as we know them didn’t really exist in the Midwest or South in the early ’90s,” said Jason Arsaga, coffee director of Arsaga’s Coffee Roasters.

When Cindy and Cary Arsaga, founders of the family coffee dynasty, applied for their first loan to open a coffee shop in Fayetteville in 1992, the bank replied, “You want to open a donut store that doesn’t sell donuts?”

After 13 years of running coffee shops in Northwest Arkansas, Arsaga’s familyowned operation started roasting in 2005.

Due to customer demand, it began offering subscription services in 2017.

“We currently offer a few subscription options that include a roaster’s choice, espresso or a blend of blends that can be delivered weekly, bi-weekly or monthly,” Arsaga said. “The benefit to customers is that they can get fresh coffee delivered to their home on a schedule.

For customers who choose our roaster’s choice option, they also get first access to new coffees as they come in.”

Arsaga said that it usually has 20-40 subscribers and that subscriptions have not increased since the pandemic started.

Arsaga’s at the Depot in downtown Fayetteville remains closed for the time being.

Arsaga’s opened Arsaga’s Mill District last fall in south Fayetteville. In 2019 the company opened a drive-thru location affectionately known as “Carsaga’s” at 1509 MLK Jr. Blvd. in Fayetteville.

“The drive-thru has been our lifeline during all of this,” Arsaga said. “It was a little risky to try to take the concept of high-quality coffee service to a drive-thru model, but folks have responded very well to it.”

RED LIGHT ROASTERY Adam Moore, roaster and co-owner of Red Light Roastery in Hot Springs, said his coffee shop started offering subscriptions about two years ago and that it has grown quite a bit over the past year.

“We are about to promote it more across all social media platforms to see how we can grow more,” Moore said. The coffee house was closed to the public from March to May of last year, and Moore said they took that time to work on online ordering and streamlining their shipping department. “We added all our products in the coffee house to our online shop platform,” Moore said. Merchandise like enamel pins, keychains and tumblers are available on its online store as well. Subscriptions, which include 1-pound, 2-pound or 5-pound bag options, arrive the first week of each month and you can subscribe for three months, six months or a full year. Customers can choose between whole bean, ground (coarse, medium or fine) or K-Cup pods.

ONYX COFFEE LAB Onyx Coffee Lab has locations in Fayetteville, Bentonville and Rogers. In addition to subscription services, it offers virtual classes on home brewing. Onyx was recognized nationally at the 2020 U.S. Coffee Championships last February in Costa Mesa, Calif., with employees Elika Liftee and Lance Hendrick winning first and second place in the Brewers Cup Championship and barista Andrea Allen taking home the first-place prize in the U.S. Barista Championship.

Onyx’s subscription service offers savings on 10-ounce, 2-pound or 5-pound bags that are delivered every two weeks or monthly.

Sustainability and design are taken into account. Bags come in sleek recyclable boxes and, although the coffee bags are made with nonrenewable plastic and foil, they’re 60% compostable.

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HERstory:

CELEBRATING WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH

During Women’s History Month, we celebrate our Women of Water (WoW), for the role they play in the water reclamation processes that help Little Rock thrive! We recognize women like Kenetta, Communications & Outreach Supervisor, who upholds our commitment to being an active community partner and educates ratepayers about our role as a protector of public health and the environment.

Learn more about our Women of Water, their positions and our diverse people and processes at lrwra.com/wow.

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MARCH 2021 59

CANNABIZ

DESERVING T DISCOUNTS A SURVEY OF ARKANSAS MEDICAL MARIJUANA DISPENSARIES’ COMPASSIONATE CARE PLANS.

BY GRIFFIN COOP

60 MARCH 2021

ARKANSAS TIMES

ammy Calder is never sure if she’s going to be able to get out of bed on time in the morning.

Degenerative disc disease, severe arthritis and fibromyalgia leave her in constant pain and she hasn’t been able to work in more than eight years. Calder, who lives in Huntsville (Madison County) on a limited income, uses medical marijuana to help with her medical conditions.

Thanks to discounts called compassionate care plans, she can afford it.

Calder shops at a dispensary called Acanza in Fayetteville, where she qualifies for a discount of 10% during the week and 20% on Sundays. Without the discount, Calder said, she would not be able to afford her medications.

Calder prefers to shop at Acanza on Sunday mornings when the dispensary’s compassionate care patients receive a bigger discount and when the store’s lower-priced items are still in stock.

“That’s the importance of getting it on Sunday morning at 10 a.m. from Acanza, because I wouldn’t be able to get them [otherwise],” Calder said. “Absolutely not. Can barely afford it as it is.”

So what would Calder do if she didn’t have a discount program to offset the costs?

“I would have to go without,” she said.

Compassionate care plans, which vary by dispensary, offer discounts to different groups of patients, including people on limited incomes, veterans, seniors, children and employees. All of the state’s 32 operating dispensaries have a compassionate care plan, according to Medical Marijuana Commission spokesman Scott Hardin.

Dispensaries included their compassionate care plans in their original applications for a dispensary license and can update them once a year during the state Medical Marijuana Commission’s license renewal period in May and June. The plans, which may include discounts, promotions and coupons, are the only discounts dispensaries can offer.

The commission does not set limits on the minimums or maximums of the discounts or what groups can be offered discounts.

“Obviously, the product can’t be offered for free, but there aren’t any limitations on the discount itself,” Hardin said. “This is driven by the market and the dispensaries’ willingness to offer discounts and promotions.”

The plans are not available to the public and are not subject to the state’s Freedom of Information Act because of an exemption in the law reserved for information that would provide a

competitive advantage to other businesses.

Some of the dispensaries provide the details on their plans on their websites, while others provide only an application form or no information at all.

“We’ve received FOIA requests for them in the past and many of the dispensaries claimed it would be a competitive advantage issue, but the discount is ultimately going to be made public [when it is made available to the patient],” Hardin said.

Bloom Medicinals of Texarkana is one of the dispensaries that advertises its compassionate care plan on its website. Bloom offers a 20% discount to veterans, a 20% discount to “indigent” customers and a 10% discount to

Enlightened Cannabis for People offers a variety of discounts at its dispensaries in Arkadelphia, Clarksville, Heber Springs and Morrilton. Like many dispensaries, Enlightened offers a discount to veterans (10% off) and patients who receive Social Security Disability Insurance payments (10% off), but the Enlightened dispensaries also offer a 10% discount to patients under 18 years old.

“Often, pediatric medical cannabis patients are burdened by massive costs for other medications they require,” Dusty Shroyer, who manages all Enlightened’s Arkansas stores, said via email.

“Given our deep commitment to equitable access to medical cannabis, Enlightened strives to ensure these patients receive this effective

“Every dollar adds up. For some patients, that 20% off makes the difference in them being able to get that medication.” seniors 55 years and older on every purchase.

Patients qualify for discounts by providing documents to the dispensary. Veterans can provide forms from a veterans office, while patients qualifying for the “indigent” discount can provide a copy of a Medicaid card or food stamps, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP, according to Bloom assistant general manager Rhonda Scott.

Thanks to the Texarkana VA Clinic on the Arkansas side of the border and the Red River Army Depot on the Texas side, Scott said Texarkana has a large population of retired veterans who use medicinal cannabis and take advantage of the dispensary’s discount program.

Scott says some low-income patients need the dispensary’s discount in order to afford medical marijuana.

“For some it makes a difference,” Scott said.

“Every dollar adds up. For some patients, that 20% off makes the difference in them being able to participate in the medical program and be able to get that medication.”

Bloom also offers daily specials, including a 20% discount on regularly priced edibles on what they call “Medible Monday.”

medication at an affordable price.”

Arkansas Natural Products in Clinton offers discounts to seniors, veterans and low-income patients. Seniors get 10% off, veterans get 20% off and patients on Social Security Disability Insurance get 20% off. The store’s “Compassion Discount” provides 20% off to low-income patients on a case-by-case basis. Patients can provide their most recent tax return or an award letter from the Department of Human Services when applying for that program, according to the store’s website.

The store also offers 10% off a new customer’s entire first purchase and has a loyalty program in which customers receive points that can be redeemed for discounts.

The dispensary also offers a daily special in which the store discounts a product each day, shift manager Justin Smith said.

“That way everybody gets a little bit of the sale treatment,” Smith said.

While the dispensary has a variety of discounts, not every customer qualifies, so the store tries to make items available at a variety of pricing levels.

“Cannabis is such a natural, holistic medicine. It’s hard to put a price tag on that,” Smith said.

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HERstory:

CELEBRATING WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH

During Women’s History Month, we celebrate our Women of Water (WoW), for the role they play in the water reclamation processes that help Little Rock thrive!

We recognize women like Ganelle, Little Rock Water Reclamation Commission Chair, who leads our board in making decisions that protect the fiscal and physical well-being of our ratepayers.

Learn more about our Women of Water, their positions and our diverse people and processes at lrwra.com/wow.

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MARCH 2021 61

THE GREEN PAGES

Special Advertising Section 62 MARCH 2021

ARKANSAS TIMES ARKANSASTIMES.COM

AUGUST 2020 51

THE SOURCE

The Source 406 Razorback Drive Bentonville, AR 72712 479-330-9333 thesource-ar.com

We are your source for a grassroots approach to wellness. The Source is a full-service medical cannabis dispensary focused on variety, fair pricing and customer experience. With one of the largest selections of cannabis products in the state, The Source provides patients with the option to choose from strains with different terpene profiles, usages and effects. In addition to a diverse rotating selection of edibles, concentrates, topicals and tinctures, The Source offers a wide variety of traditional cannabis flower with consistent and reliable stock from five different cultivators. Patients can complement their lifestyle with our custom line of branded merch featuring collaborations with local artists and more.

We believe medical cannabis is a customized experience. Whether a patient is new to cannabis or well-versed, our staff of knowledgeable budtenders is on hand to guide patients to the right product to suit their needs.

Health and safety are our top priority.

The Source features two pickup windows for online orders as well as a retail space to accommodate safe social distancing. Masks are required for all patients and staff, sanitizer is readily available for patient use and our retail space features plexiglass shield guards to further enforce safety. Patients are encouraged to pre-order online through our

website or our free customized app, “The Source — Dispensary” available for both iOS and Android.

The Source is a cash-only business. An ATM is located in the store lobby for patients’ convenience. The Source accepts valid in-state medical marijuana cards. Guests visiting from out-of-state may purchase products from The Source with a valid temporary medical marijuana card as issued by the Arkansas Department of Health. Minors under the age of 18 must be accompanied by an adult to enter the dispensary.

The Source’s current operation hours are 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Sunday and Monday, 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday. To stay in the loop on news, product updates and more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram @ thesourcenwa or on Facebook at The Source AR. Medical marijuana is for use by qualified patients only. Keep out of reach of children.

Marijuana is for use by qualified patients only. Keep out of reach of children. Marijuana use during pregnancy or breastfeeding poses potential harms. Marijuana is not approved by the FDA to treat, cure or prevent any disease. Do not operate a vehicle or machinery under the influence of marijuana.

ARKANSASTIMES.COM

MARCH 2021 63

MARCH FINDS

A special advertising section 64 MARCH 2021

ARKANSAS TIMES

Upholstery | Pillows | Drapery | Headboards | Wallpaper | Home Accessories WE DO IT ALL

Wild & Wonderful

Temporary Covid Hours 10:00-4:00 Mon-Sat • 1523 Rebsamen Park Rd • Little Rock • 501-663-0460 • cynthiaeastfabrics.com

Experience the new art museum located on the campus of Hendrix College.

Free and open to all.

1. BIRDLAND Boswell Mourot Fine Art represents fine art by local, national and international artists for the established and emerging collector. This 48-by-36 inch acrylic on canvas is by Susan Chambers. Boswell Mourot Fine Art Gallery, 501-664-0030, boswellmourot.com.

2. STITCHY GOODNESS Check out these adorable embroidery kits! Cynthia East Fabrics, 501-299-9199, cynthiaeastfabrics.com.

3. SPRING BREAK! Who doesn’t love a tie-dyed scrunchy?

They fit perfectly in our cute spring embroidered ditty bags. Also, they’re the perfect size to carry your masks! Rhea Drug, 501-664-4117.

4. ‘JACK THE FREEDOM DOG’ A delightful book about a dog with an independent streak who develops a relationship with a fighting feline. It’s an educational and heart-warming story about the power of friendship. Patbeckerbooks. com. Patbeckerbooks.com.

5. MUST READ Order your signed copy of Kevin Brockmeier’s new book, “The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories.” Available March 9, WordsWorth Books, 501-663-9198, wordsworthbookstore.com.

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KENSUKE YAMADA Ramune Candy Roll WWW.WINDGATEMUSEUM.ORG

Learn about virtual programs and how to visit the museum during COVID-19.

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Open 4 pm Mon, Thurs, Fri Open 11am Sat and Sun Closed Tuesday and Wednesday

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MARCH 2021 65

THE OBSERVER

SQUINTING AT DIAMONDS

A

t 9:21 a.m. on a Tuesday in the middle of February — Fat Tuesday, actually — The Observer took the trash out. That most perfunctory of ventures, a few dozen steps to the south side of the house and back, now required preparation, as a half-foot of feathery snow had blanketed our swath of the state two days earlier, bringing with it record-breaking low temperatures that called for rubber boots, a scarf and The Big Coat.

Had we not spent nearly a year going through a meticulous routine before leaving the house for other such mundane ventures — doublemasking for a trip to the post office, checking our bag for hand sanitizer before heading to the bank — the wardrobe fuss at the doorstep might have seemed like more of an oddity.

But here we were, by now quite accustomed to the idea of simple household tasks requiring careful forethought. As if, a mere three days into a doubled-down quarantine, we were suddenly hardened to the prospect of inconvenience. Like New Yorkers when they decide to do a load of laundry, or Angelenos when they set out for the gridlocked 90-minute commute to work.

Or Alaskans when the sleet falls sideways and soaks a new batch of firewood. Or, for that matter, a fatigued hospital nurse punching the clock at the beginning of another double shift tending to COVID-19 patients.

Truth is, though, we aren’t like any of those people. We aren’t cut out for this at all. We’re spoiled rotten by a work commute that, before the pandemic drove us mostly homeward to do our jobs there, took all of 6 minutes. The Big Coat is pretty much our only big coat, pulled out of the closet for these rare weatherly occasions or for travel to colder climes. We wouldn’t know a tire chain from a tow chain. If we split firewood, it’s for fun, not utility. And, like most of our neighbors, we had committed supreme and sustained hubris by careening through life 66 MARCH 2021

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with uninsulated plumbing.

We’d been spared thus far the rolling power outages our Texan neighbors to the southwest were enduring. But by Fat Tuesday, the novelty of cardboard box sledding and joking about Little Rock’s bread-and-milk stampede had worn off, and less lightsome concerns had set in. We wondered if our mostly elderly neighbors were postponing a trip to the doctor or a vaccination appointment this snowbound week, whether they’d suppress their pride enough to ask us for help if they needed it, and how we might safely transport them out of the neighborhood if they did. We wondered why our fledgling heat-andair unit wasn’t recovering even after a good solid bop to its metal housing or a push of its “reset” button. We wondered whether, in its absence, our strategic space heater placement would prop up our ancient pipes until they could thaw.

We wondered what unholy terrors awaited us in the “Amount Due” box on our next Entergy bill.

Beset by those thoughts and properly bundled (or bundled enough to shuffle to the trash can, anyway), we stepped into the frozen drifts to discover we’d left a most important accessory behind — sunglasses. Bright eastern light beamed down to touch every snowcovered thing in sight — which is to say, everything. The effect was blinding, and as we squinted, we noticed the snow had taken on a different mantle than it wore when it was freshfallen and uniformly powdery. Now, individual flakes reflected sunlight in all directions, as if some zaftig, fur-clad goddess had visited overnight, winding up for an underhand pitch and hurling a spray of diamonds across the surface of the snow.

When we stepped back inside to shed the winterwear and trade it for slippers and a sweatshirt, our eyes struggled to adjust to the relative dimness for what seemed like forever.

We’d only spent a few moments in the sun

and snow, but our pupils, being the resilient wonders they are, had narrowed to the size of a pinhead in an act of swift bio-adaptation.

Meanwhile, a few inches behind those tiny pupils, our brain’s synapses were primed for mythological daydreaming by the notion of a diamond-hurling snow goddess, so we were reminded of that tale you learn at the very beginning of a college course in classics or philosophy: Plato’s allegory of the cave. In it, Socrates concocts a thought experiment in which a group of prisoners is kept chained to a wall underground, their backs to a burning fire, so that the only activities the prisoners see are the shadows of what’s happening behind them. Only a few humans ever escape the cave to see real objects instead of mere shadows.

When they do, the light hurts their eyes, but they eventually adjust, and are irrevocably changed.

We wondered about what happens to all of us after the snow melts, and after the threat of the pandemic subsides. We wondered how easily we might slip back into life’s default settings once a trip to the bank or the trash bin becomes, again, an errand that calls for no special preparation. We wondered how long the post-pandemic honeymoon of live music and dinner parties and effusive hugging will last.

We wondered if the freedom to do mundane tasks without risk or adversity would make us less mindful about doing them. We wondered whether we have learned anything from this last tempestuous year, and whether it’s possible that we could emerge on the other side, irrevocably changed for the better — slightly less prone to road rage or energy-draining grudges, slightly more inclined to tenderness.

The Observer hopes so. We hope there are so many glittering diamonds in view that we need sunglasses to lay eyes on them all without squinting.

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