SAN DIEGO, Calif. – Administrators at Black Mountain Middle School are spending this week scratching off a racial slur that was printed on the cover of the school’s yearbook by accident.

School officials did not realize the yearbook contained the racial slur until after 1,000 copies of the annual were printed and several hundred handed out to Black Mountain eighth-graders on Monday, NBC San Diego reports.

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Yearbook staff used a historical map from the 1800s as a backdrop for the cover, and students who received their annual Monday pointed out that the n-word appeared just above the title “Looking for Adventure.”

The “very derogatory label” stemmed from an area of San Diego County that was once home to a freed slave, and school officials didn’t notice until it was too late, Poway Unified School District spokeswoman Christine Paik told KGTV.

Paik said school officials recalled the yearbooks handed out to eighth-graders to fix the mistake, and they plan to redistribute the annuals to all students on Wednesday.

Paik said sixth- and seventh-grade students had not yet received their yearbooks.

“Approximately 1,000 yearbooks … were corrected,” she told CBS 8. “Literally staff went through each yearbook and scratched off that word from the cover, so that we can get these yearbooks in time to our kids.”

“This was an unfortunate inadvertent mistake on the part of our yearbook staff and yearbook advisor,” Paik said.

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Parents expressed mixed reactions about the ordeal.

“I think it was an honest mistake,” grandparent Mark Guss said, “I don’t think it was meant to harm anybody.”

“It’s unfortunate that it happened,” parent Scott Grider added, “sounds like the district is taking the right measures to get it fixed.”

“It’s not appropriate in an eighth-grade yearbook. It’s unfortunate,” Concerned Parents Alliance spokeswoman Darlene Willis told NBC San Diego. “We just have to all be more conscious of paying attention and checking and double checking and triple checking to make sure it’s not offensive to folks and the current language they have is offensive.”

Willis thinks the incident shows more “cultural sensitivity” is necessary at Black Mountain.

“We’ve got some work to do,” she said. “I think this is the perfect opportunity for the school district to do more cultural sensitivity and make sure that those folks that are in charge of things like this, that they read and re-read, double check, triple check so that doesn’t happen again. Not in 2017. We can’t go back in time.”

School officials also sent a message hoe to parents about the snafu.

“We deeply regret this error and have recalled all yearbooks distributed to grade 8 students and will delay distributing the books to our grade 6 and 7 students,” the message read in part. “We understand how important the yearbooks are to our students and are working on getting their memories to them. We are making the correction and will redistribute the yearbooks as soon as possible.”