PIKE COUNTY, Miss. – A former Mississippi middle school teacher was given a six-month suspended sentence and will not be required to register as a sex offender after he showed students nude photos of himself on his cell phone.

James David Clements, 34, pleaded no contest last Friday to one count of contributing to the neglect of a minor for allegedly showing students nude pictures of himself on his cell phone last year. Clements, of McComb, was a teacher at North Pike Middle School in Pike County, Mississippi, the Associated Press reports.

“The no contest plea isn’t an admission of guilt but is treated as such for sentencing,” according to the news service. “The Enterprise-Journal reports Clements was given a six-month suspended sentence. He was directed to have no contact with the victims and to undergo one year of unsupervised probation.”

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Clements is the latest in a long line of educators who have crossed the line with students and received minimal punishment for their misdeeds. Thankfully, Clements is no longer working as a middle school teacher, but educators who have committed much more egregious sexual acts against students have retained their positions thanks to union-friendly state tenure laws and teachers contracts that put employee “rights” ahead of students’ welfare.

The New York Post recently highlighted several teachers – dubbed the Foul Four – who have collected more than a million dollars a piece from New York City taxpayers after they were accused of serious crimes against students. In those cases, an arbitrator ruled the teachers should be returned to the classroom, but education officials have instead opted to keep the dangerous pedophiles busy with office work and other trivial tasks that keep them away from students.

In other school districts, union and school officials have conspired to negotiate secret deals for teachers accused of sexual misdeeds with students that exchanges a letter of resignation for a letter of recommendation for future employment.

Legislation currently pending in the U.S. Senate aimed at outlawing the secret “passing the trash” deals, as they’re known, has met the objections of the nation’s teachers unions and has languished in committee.

Meanwhile, misbehaving teachers are preying on students in schools across the country. An estimated one in ten American students are victimized by pedophile teachers at some point in their K-12 school years.