The West Valley High School teacher facing contract nonrenewal for his use of the N-word in his Spanish class in April convened a group of supporters in Millwood Park Thursday to continue to defend his actions.
Matthew Mastronardi read a passage from "To Kill A Mockingbird" that contained the slur in his Spanish class. Following the incident, school superintendent Kyle Rydell recommended his provisional employee contract not be renewed. In his third year teaching, Mastronardi was on a provisional contract that can be terminated for any reason, Rydell said.
The West Valley School Board will consider Mastronardi's contract at a meeting at 8 a.m. Wednesday at the school district office.
More than 50 people gathered Thursday, also Juneteenth, at a rally Mastronardi organized. Attendees included 13 West Valley High School students, one of whom was the student who prompted Mastronardi to read the slur — "one of my favorite students," Mastronardi said.
The moment came when Mastronardi overheard a group of his Spanish students discussing the book, assigned in their freshman English class, and how their English teacher told them not to read aloud the N-Word when encountering it in the text. Mastronardi chimed in that he would read each word as written, including the slur, and rising sophomore Hayden Holdway invited him to "put his money where his mouth is, so to speak," Hayden said, handing Mastronardi his copy of the novel open to a page containing the slur. Mastronardi obliged, and one of his students recorded him without his knowledge.
"Before he went up there and read it, he said, over and over, 'I don't think anybody should say this word on discriminatory manner. It was a purely academic context, and this is for teaching lessons of critical thinking and that we shouldn't have language control,' " Hayden said.
In his English class, Hayden said his teacher would supplement the word with "Black man." Rydell and Christine Coulston, a former English teacher at West Valley, each said in interviews Friday that the decision to omit the word is a carefully reached consensus among the English department at the school.
"We don't necessarily censor the literature as it was written, we just address it in a way that students are prepared for and can ask safe questions before we get to it," Coulston said, adding that students "have eyes" and still see the word even though teachers elect not to say it aloud.
Coulston questioned why the book came up in a Spanish classroom, with a teacher who wasn't privy to the English department's approach to the word: surrounding it with historical and modern context and allowing students — or their parents — to recuse themselves from the text.
Spokane NAACP Vice President Jaime Stacey said in an interview Friday the word is harmful to the Black community, even when read in a context intended to be educational like in Mastronardi's case. She invited Mastronardi to reflect on his actions.
"We're not trying to call you out; we're trying to call you in," she said, directed at Mastronardi. "To have some courageous conversations around the harm that you are perpetuating, maybe you're not aware. Even at times awareness alone is not enough; you have to lean into the Three A's: awareness, accountability, action."
Mastronardi stands by his actions. He acknowledged the timing of his event on Juneteenth, a holiday commemorating the anniversary of when 250,000 enslaved Black people were freed in the Southern United States, two years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the emancipation proclamation.
Mastronardi said his gathering suited the spirit of the holiday. He proceeded to quote a tweet from former President Barack Obama that read, in part, "On Juneteenth, we celebrate freedom and recommit ourselves to the work that remains to be done."
"What is Juneteenth? It celebrates freedom, truth, dignity, and he says it right here," Mastronardi said. "So if there is any work left undone, it's that we should be able to tell the truth, regardless of one's skin color."
© 2025 The Spokesman-Review (Spokane, Wash.). Visit www.spokesman.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
