Phoenix Printer Helping Arizona Teachers Finds Himself A Target

PHOENIX, AZ – For Dan Hargest, it started out as a charitable gesture that turned into a trip down the rabbit hole. An effort to help striking teachers by printing "Red for Ed" shirts led to him being accused of partaking in a conspiracy.

It seemed like a simple proposition. A teacher was looking to print tee-shirts for herself and colleagues as they worked to call attention to a lack of funding for education and the fact that they are among the worst paid teachers in the country.

"It's really impossible to overstate how important teachers are," Hargest, who owns Acme Prints, tells Patch.

"I wanted to do something to help, let them know they are appreciated." (Get Phoenix Patch's daily newsletter and real-time news alerts. Or, find your local Patch here and subscribe).

Hargest says that the teacher figured she would post online and maybe 50, maybe 100 of her colleagues would want the shirts. The teachers were just starting to organize, following in the footsteps of their colleagues in West Virginia.

"She came back the next day and said that 3,000 people had ordered shirts," he says. "I don't have a lot of money but I wanted to help so we agreed that we would print the shirts at cost."

For that first run, Hargest, charged them only $3 a shirt. That was below cost and a donation of roughly $6,000 on his part.

"We donate a lot of services and it often doesn't turn in to much," he says. "This turned out to be quite different."

The 3,000 shirts quickly turned into 25,000. At that point, Hargest, wanting to help, said that he was going to charge them $6. While that was doubling the price, it was still just cost. He wasn't going to make any money off the deal.

"Normally, when we have a large order we can reach out to people from other shops to come help," he says. "In this case, every shop started printing the shirts and there was no one available.

"We started working crazy hours, printing every opportunity that we had."

Soon, other shops were printing the shirts, even though Hargest was the only one who had actually signed a deal with the teacher who made the design. But that didn't bother Hargest, who says that "they were printing for different reasons than us, so they weren’t really competition.

"The thing is, they were charging $15 or $20 for a shirt so people have kept coming to us."

It wasn't only teachers that started coming in.

"We got a call one day," he says. "A guy said that we had to stop printing the shirts. And then he hung up.

"The worker who took the call was concerned but I wrote it off as some crazy, or maybe a competitor upset that we were selling our shirts for so much less."

It turned out that the caller was Jasper Nichols, a man from Cave Creek who would prove to be persistent.

"The calls kept coming and he kept hanging up," Hargest says. "I was really suspicious of who the guy was. I figured that if he was genuinely concerned about the shirts, he would accept the offer to speak with the owner."

Finally, one day he did.

"He started telling me that he owned the rights to the name and, having a background that includes times in bands and time working at Kinkos, where they did a good job training us on issues like copyright and trademark, I figured that the guy had some legitimate organization that had the same name," he says.

"I told him that I was sorry. I wished that the teachers had checked to see if the name was already being used."

It turns out that it wasn't.

"He kept insisting that he owned the rights to the name, Arizona Educators United, but it turned out that he had just registered the name with the Secretary of State's office, which is not the same thing. I knew I was on safe legal ground."

And that's when things started to fall apart.

"He was aggressive," Hargest says. "The more we talked, the more it became clear that he really wasn't interested in stopping the shirts. He wanted to know where the money was coming from.

"He believed that the money was coming from out of state, that the teachers were being funded as part of a larger movement to 'disrupt the state legislature.'"

"I know where the whole thing is going and the purpose of it — which I don’t want to discuss, but I don’t like it," Nichols can be heard saying in a recording of a conversation that Hargest shared with Patch.

Nichols insists that the money for RedforEd was coming from a militant wing of the AFL-CIO.

"I told him it was most definitely not the case," Hargest says. "I explained to him that of the 25,000 shirts we've printed, we've received almost 25,000 orders.

"Sure there have been some orders where someone ordered a dozen or more but mostly it's been individual orders. The more I insisted, the more he was resistant to the truth."

That's what has Hargest concerned.

"It's not just this guy," Hargest says. "It worries me that there's all these people out there who, when you try to explain to them how their conspiracy theory is wrong, just take it as proof that there is something else going on.

"They believe whatever they want to believe. It doesn't matter what the truth is. These people are the product of poor education."

For Hargest, that's what brings it back to the teachers and why he wants to help them.

"These are people who are the worst paid in the country," he says. "Despite that, they work as hard as anyone, use money out of their own pockets to help students.

"They go out of the way to help the children of Arizona. We have an obligation to help them."

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Photo courtesy Nathan Smith.