Ciara Parizek/MDN Carlotta Goldade has been the Lewis and Clark Elementary School librarian for the previous 22 years. She will be retiring after 47 years in the Minot Public School system.

After 47 years with Minot Public Schools, librarian Carlotta Goldade is closing the book on a satisfying career to embark on retirement.

Goldade said she is looking forward to retirement, but it will be bittersweet. She is retiring from Lewis & Clark Elementary School, having previously worked at the former Jefferson Elementary School.

After graduating high school, Goldade went to Jamestown University, majoring in physical and history education.

“I thought being a teacher would be fun,” Goldade said.

Beginning in 1977, Goldade took a position at Jefferson Elementary as a temporary Title I teacher while the original teacher was out on maternity leave for six weeks. She did not want to return the next fall, so the position was offered to Goldade, who accepted.

The part-time library teacher at Jefferson also worked part time at North Hill School. The North Hill school’s library was much larger than Jefferson’s. The north school’s library then expanded, taking up even more of the teacher’s time until she was no longer able to teach at both schools.

Goldade was then approached by the principal to see if she would be interested in teaching the library classes.

Not long after, Jefferson Elementary was having difficulty keeping people on staff to supervise the children while they were out at recess, so again, the principal asked Goldade if she wanted to take that position in addition to the other two to make her a full-time employee of Minot Public Schools.

After 25 years, Jefferson Elementary School was on the brink of closing, and uncertainty crept up on Goldade, who was unsure whether she was going to have a job in the fall.

She had applied to work at North Hill School before and actually interviewed for the position, but it was given to someone else. That other person did not stick around.

In 2002, Goldade received a call from North Hill School, offering her a full-time position as the school’s librarian, teaching all of the school’s library classes.

Two years later, the school’s name was officially changed to Lewis and Clark Elementary School.

As the years went on, she applied for several history teaching jobs, but was never called.

“I think I was meant to be here, because that would have put me in high school,” Goldade said. “I got to the point where I enjoyed it and it was a nice job to have and I just kept staying here.”

As a teacher, she also would have been under contract. As a librarian, she was not under contract.

She enjoyed working with the younger students so much that she stayed an additional 22 years after Jefferson.

She did eventually go back to school to add a library science minor to her degree.

In 2006, Goldade was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer. Given three years to live, Goldade is still kicking. In spite of the cancer, she persevered and continued teaching classes at Lewis and Clark through six rounds of chemo and several radiation treatments. The principal at the time made a large sign with Goldade’s name and planted it in the ground to designate a special parking space for their beloved librarian.

One day, she was given a rubber duck by one of her students. From there, the duck trend snowballed. Students, parents and staff members alike had given her thousands of ducks, ranging from rubber to plastic to stuffed. She even went so far as to go to the store and purchase a duck-shaped floatation device to relax on while she was at the lake.

“That’s the only duck I bought for myself,” Goldade said.

After doing some research, it was discovered the world record for a rubber duck collection is over 5,631. Goldade said she and her family members stopped counting around the 3,300 mark.

Some of them are plain yellow rubber ducks, and others are colored, patterned and designed with different logos as collectibles. Around seven of the ducks she was given are coin banks.

When the 2023-2024 school year started to wrap up, Goldade and another staff member brought in all of her ducks and set many of them up on the bookshelves in the library.

On May 16, seniors from Magic City Campus who had attended Lewis and Clark Elementary School were invited to walk through and see how their former librarian’s collection grew.