In August, a hearing officer gave a teacher found to have lewdly solicited one of his students over the Internet a one-year suspension. This week, a Manhattan Supreme Court judge called the teacher “every parent’s worst nightmare” and deemed the penalty “totally irrational.”

The judge, Rolando Acosta, wrote that a one-year suspension “defies logic,” given the level of sexual misconduct. And he said it sends the wrong message to the teacher, Cary Hershkowitz, to other teachers, and to students and families.

The one-year suspension serves to tell Mr. Hershkowitz “and everybody else that these perverted and insidious acts are not serious,” Justice Acosta wrote.

He also said it tells the student and her mother that the girl’s courage in resisting Mr. Hershkowitz’s “persistent and improper advances” and her mother’s resolve in reporting them “were for naught.”

“This Court simply cannot countenance such attempt. Instead, this Court chooses to call this teacher’s acts for what they are – an abuse of trust of the most serious kind; one that warrants forfeiture of the privilege to share his knowledge with those more vulnerable,” Justice Acosta wrote.

He recommended that the teacher be fired and ordered that the case be heard by another hearing officer.

This week’s development in the Hershkowitz case represents yet another iteration of a case that originated in June 1998, when the tenured chemistry teacher at the Health Professions and Human Services High School set up a screen name for one of his 16-year-old students and started sending her vulgar messages about whether she would want to have sex with him and about how he and the student would touch each other if they got together. He also called the student’s home from his cell phone multiple times, until her mother intercepted a phone call.

Mr. Hershkowitz formally acknowledged his conduct in 1998, but the case didn’t end when the chemistry teacher signed his statement.

Since then, the lawyer representing Mr. Hershkowitz, an attorney with the New York State United Teachers, has argued that the teacher’s signed statement should be excluded on a technicality and that the teacher should receive a milder punishment than termination, since there was never any physical contact between him and the student. As the battle has dragged through the courts, Mr. Hershkowitz was paid $81,232 a year.

In a statement issued yesterday, the counsel to the city’s Department of Education, Michael Best, said the department shouldn’t have to waste years trying to fire teachers who acted as inappropriately as Mr. Hershkowitz did.

“The court’s decision is obviously correct, but the fact that we had to go to court to get this decision illustrates how dysfunctional the current disciplinary process is, and how difficult it is to obtain a proper decision, even where, like here, there is no room for debate,” Mr. Best said. “The process is so broken that the court took the rare step of overturning the hearing officer in this case.”

Speaking of Mr. Hershkowitz, he said: “This kind of behavior is absolutely unacceptable, and we will continue to use all means available to remove offenders from our schools and to prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law.”

This week, the schools chancellor, Joel Klein, sent a note to principals reminding them that “abuse of this sort is absolutely unacceptable.”

He said that he has supported legislation in Albany to make it a criminal offense for an employee of the Department of Education to engage in sexual contact with any student, and that he is working with lawmakers to develop additional legislation to require the dismissal of any employee found by the special commissioner of investigation to have engaged in sexual activity with a student.

The president of the United Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, has maintained that the city union is on the department’s side when it comes to keeping perverted teachers out of schools, but she said legislation isn’t necessary. She advocates streamlining the disciplinary process by making changes in the teachers’ contract.

In a statement yesterday, she said: “Any kind of sexual relationship between a teacher and student breaches a sacred trust and is not acceptable. Any teacher who is proven to have violated this trust has no business in a classroom. Last November, the union proposed a zero-tolerance policy on this issue and offered a way to do so quickly and effectively, ensuring the safety of children and safeguarding against false accusations. The city rejected it. We are still ready and willing to do this.”