White Rose Books & More hosted a grand opening celebration and ribbon cutting earlier this month for the new bookshop located at 113 Broadway in Kissimmee, Fla. The store was founded by former Osceola County school media specialists Erin Decker and Tania Galiñanes, who left the field of education due to the increasing restrictions placed on their profession by local government and parent organizations.
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| White Rose co-owners Tania Galiñanes (l.) and Erin Decker. | |
The co-owners noted that the "woman-, Latina-, and LGBTQ+-owned business strives to be a safe space, where all are welcome.... The name was inspired by the youth resistance movement group in 1940s Nazi Germany bearing the same name. With book bans in the state of Florida rising at an unprecedented rate, we are honored to be borrowing this name and carrying books that have been banned in schools and libraries throughout the state."
In a Washington Post article last weekend headlined "The librarian who couldn't take it anymore," Galiñanes addressed the reasons for her decision to leave her job, noting the ongoing series of unreasonable, often absurd, demands being put on people in her profession: "Tania could feel something shifting inside her 21st-century media center. The relationships between students and books, and parents and libraries, and teachers and the books they taught, and librarians and the job they did--all of it was changing in a place she thought had been designed to stay the same. A library was a room with shelves and books. A library was a place to read.... Now the library, or at least this library, was a place where a librarian was about to leave."
Earlier, she had discussed the possibility of leaving her profession with Decker, another librarian, who worked at a middle school and had the idea to open an independent bookstore. When a crystal shop in downtown Kissimmee said it was closing, they put in an application for the lease.
They left their jobs on the same day. Decker said, "I didn't cry until I turned my keys in."
"They gave me a card and flowers, and that's when I cried," Galiñanes replied.
"They would sit in the store they had just leased, the crystal shop in Kissimmee that was becoming a bookstore," the Post wrote. "There were no books yet on the shelves, but there would be soon. Every book they could afford. Any book at all."
On Sunday, White Rose Books & More posted on Facebook: "The response to the Washington Post article coming out yesterday online and this morning in the Sunday paper has been overwhelmingly positive. We are trying our best to reply to every e-mail, message, comment etc. on every single platform we have been discovered on. The messages have touched us, made Tania cry, and just reinforced that where we drew the line in the sand and moved on to do something new, was the right thing for us."