Eanes ISD Teacher Charged with Child Pornography, Secret Recordings

Another Texas educator has been arrested for crimes against children, and this time it involves Child Pornography. Zachary Barnett was a music teacher at Eanes Independent School Districts for three years before his arrest on February 26th, 2025. The Computer Information Technology and Electronic Crime Unit of the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) was the group that were responsible for the investigation that eventually made the arrest of Barnett possible.

It appears that most of the material Barnett was arrested with did not occur at Eanes IDS. The DPS had three warrants issued to them to support the arrest of Zachary Barnett. Barnett was in possession of some media of students in their clothes, and that media consisted of both pictures and video. It seems that the students were not aware that the photos and videos were being taken.

This is the 3rd article that I have written in 3 weeks about crimes against students by the people that we look toward to educate and guide them. Unfortunately, while background checks are utilized during the hiring process not every predator has previous offenses.

The most up to date statistics that I have been able to find regarding child pornography offenses is from 2023 and provided by the United States Sentencing Commission. That year, there were over 64,000 cases reported, but only a little over were found to involve child pornography. This was a 2.9% increase from 2019. 98% of the offenders were men, 77% were white, the average age was 41 years old, and 71% had little to no prior offenses. The Southern and Western Districts of Texas were two of the top five districts for individuals sentenced.