A West Valley High School Spanish teacher lost his job after he read aloud the ‘N-word’ from “To Kill a Mockingbird’

A West Valley High School Spanish teacher lost his job after reading a passage from “To Kill a Mockingbird” that contained a racial slur.

The West Valley School District superintendent request the school board not to renew the teaching contract of Matthew Mastronardi after a video of him reading the passage made its rounds online in which Mastronardi can be heard saying the N-word in the classic novel.

“As a lover of literature, I wanted to just respect authorial intent,” Mastronardi said in an interview on Friday.

On April 17, he overheard a group of his beginner Spanish students discussing the book they were assigned in freshman English class, which uses the slur multiple times. Set in 1930s Alabama, the novel explores racism and inequities in the criminal justice system through the eyes of a white child whose father is representing a Black man who was falsely accused of raping a white woman.

The students told Mastronardi their English teachers at the school take a pause when they encounter the slur in the text. He said he disagreed and would read it aloud if it were in his class, so a student asked him to read a passage that contained the slur. He didn’t know one of his students was recording his voice.

“I tried to make it a teaching moment – that calling somebody this is wrong if it’s in a discriminatory manner, but you can still read from a book. You have the right as a reader to do that,” Mastronardi said. “The author chose each word very intentionally to capture what life really was like back then, and we distance ourselves from what she wanted us to feel when we erase those words.”

In the 8-second video, Mastronardi’s students can be heard giggling and shifting in their seats after he said the slur.

“We should confront history. We shouldn’t erase it as some sort of cosmetic guilt to make ourselves feel better about it today,” Mastronardi told The Spokesman-Review. “We should confront it, and we need to expose it. We need to study it. We need to think about it. We need to understand it. And so that’s why I wanted to do it.”

The incident caught the attention of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP, alerted by a West Valley student involved in the association’s youth council. Jaime Stacey, the vice president of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP, said the use of the word was insensitive to the experiences and emotions of Black students at West Valley and the broader community, instead “centering whiteness” and white people’s opinions of the use of the word.

“The actions of that teacher lack cultural humility, and that’s very troubling for the Black students in their care in their classroom,” Stacey said. “Cultural respect requires more than awareness; it demands accountability, reflection, a willingness to decenter oneself in spaces where you know harm can be caused, like a classroom.”

Mastronardi was a provisional employee with the school district, in his third year teaching Spanish at the Millwood school. By state law, district administration can decline to renew a teacher’s contract within their first three years teaching.

By May 7, after an exchange of disciplinary materials and rebuttals from Mastronardi, the district issued him his notice of nonrenewal for reasons including concerns from parents, poor judgment and “concerns about your ability to serve as a good role model for students.”

On Wednesday, Mastronardi posted on Twitter about his experience, garnering over 2 million views, and was featured on various media outlets. After the attention, the district put him on administrative leave and barred him from the last day of school, he said. His brother, Andrew Mastronardi, also a West Valley Spanish teacher who worked just across the hall from his brother, resigned immediately.

He called his brother’s nonrenewal “unjust” and an “overreaction,” saying he’s proud of him for standing on his morals despite professional backlash. A teacher of seven years, he’s not sure how he would have acted in the same situation.

“I don’t know how I would have done that,” Andrew Mastronardi said. “Maybe I’m not as bold or as virtuous as he would have been.”

West Valley Superintendent Kyle Rydell said the high school’s English department has consensus on how to approach the word in the book that’s been in freshman English curriculum for at least 15 years. In those years, the English teachers have consistently skipped over the word or referred to it as the N-Word.

Rydell said discussions involving such a sensitive word should have stayed in the walls of English classrooms, where teachers are trained to approach the slur with consideration of their pupils and the historical context in which it was used.

“We don’t want teachers outside of the (English Language Arts) class to take on a paragraph or take on a subject that’s not part of their curriculum, because it’s not done in the same respectful fashion that one of our trained ELA teachers will give it,” he said.

An English teacher of eight years and former teaching leader for West Valley’s English department, Christine Coulston said her department works to ensure students feel comfortable with the material, including inviting parents to opt their kids out of reading the novel if they want. That never happened in Mastronardi’s classroom.

“That’s really important to us, that we are making sure that we’re bringing in that diversity that’s so important, but also that we are doing it in a safe way where kids feel heard and understood,” said Coulston, who works at the district office.

She never taught the book in her classes, but she said her colleagues always tread lightly, omitting the word itself but surrounding it with the lesson that it’s derogatory. She questioned why the passage would come up in a Spanish class, without the carefully constructed guardrails of her English teacher peers.

Stacey is also the leadership teacher at Rogers High . As an educator, she’s been invited to English classrooms discussing the book and the harm of that word specifically. She said “To Kill a Mockingbird” is important to teach history, but said abstaining from saying the word or using the abbreviated word is more appropriate.

“There is a certain level of harm and trauma that comes from hearing that word spoken, especially in the nonslang form, because that was what was used to call and dehumanize an entire group of people,” Stacey said.

After some students learned that Mastronardi was out at West Valley, one started an online petition to reinstate him. It’s since garnered over 2,000 signatures from inside and outside of West Valley as of Saturday evening. Mastronardi also started an online fundraiser in light of his job loss, raising about $5,000 as of Saturday evening.

Some students were upset at the departure of the Mastronardi brothers. Sophomore Chance Dharo said Matthew Mastronardi was “like a father figure to me,” doling life advice that extends beyond Spanish.

“What he told me that really maybe changed my way of thinking was, ‘Is it true? And does it need to be said?’ ” Dharo said, adding that he thinks before he speaks.

Unsure of where to go from here, the brothers plan to appeal the school board’s decision at their next meeting at 8 a.m. June 25 at the school district office, when the board will weigh in on Rydell’s recommendation to not renew Mastronardi’s contract. Though they say their strong Christian faith provides solace that “God is sovereign over every situation,” they’ll miss the job where they worked right across the hall from each other.

Matthew Mastronardi doesn’t regret his actions.

“My conscience is clean,” he said.

Editor’s Note: This story has been corrected to show the school board has not yet weighed in on Mastronardi’s contract, that will happen at the June 25 board meeting.