The middle letter of an odd-length word is irrelevant in determining whether the word is a palindrome. Just ignore it.
Hint: all you need is a slight tweak to the following line to make this work for all word lengths:
secondHalf = word[finalWordLength + 1:]
P.S. If you insist on handling the two cases separately, if len(word) % 2: ... would tell you that the word has an odd number of characters.
