Over the past month, former West Valley High School Spanish teacher Matthew Mastronardi has taken to social media claiming that he lost his job for reading the N-word from To Kill a Mockingbird. However, school board members and the district’s superintendent say that even without this incident, they’d still support ending Mastronardi’s contract.
Mastronardi says in April, some of his students were talking during independent work time about To Kill a Mockingbird, the 1962 Harper Lee novel detailing racial injustice and social inequity, which they were assigned in English class.
“I just overheard them saying how they have to skip over a naughty word, the N-word, and I just thought that was interesting,” Mastronardi tells the Inlander. “I calmly just expressed my disagreement with that by saying ‘Man, you really have to do that? That sort of takes away from the historical context. It undermines what the author intended you to feel.'”…