Ex-student scraps with school over uniforms
Move to under-cut supplier led to deportation threat, Jayson Fong says
Aformer Macleans College student is locked in a scrap with his old school over plans to sell second-hand uniforms online. Jayson Fong, who graduated from the Bucklands Beach school in 2017, said the uniforms sold by the official supplier were too expensive and he wanted to under-cut them to provide students with a better deal.
But the school is fighting back and reviewing how Fong got hold of a large number of students’ emails that he used to promote his business.
The stoush has threatened to get ugly, with Fong claiming he was threatened with deportation by a school staff member.
As a student, he had struggled to afford uniforms, Fong said, adding the prices were expensive at the only place you could buy them.
Pricing for new uniforms can be found on the school’s website — a new blazer costs $230, but students can get a second-hand option for $120, or rent one for $80 a year, the website says.
Fong, seeing a gap in the market, collected about 60 uniforms last year with the aim to sell them more cheaply. After he began spreading the word on Facebook, he said a school staffer called him, allegedly threatened to report him to Immigration and advised he might be deported.
“[The staffer] told me if I don’t stop [they] will contact Immigration and get me deported,” he said.
After the call, he said he gave the uniforms away, but a year later decided to pick the idea back up. Fong claimed he made no profit from sales, and did it solely to provide competition for the uniform shop.
Now a second-year engineering student at University of Auckland, he had developed an app he described as “Trade Me for second-hand clothing”. Last month, to get the message out to Macleans students, he said he used the school email address of a friend who graduated last year to send a message to all students. The school deleted the email from all student inboxes that received it.
He sent another email to the school via a personal Gmail account but it was deleted and he was blocked from the school domain.
The day after the final email was sent, principal Steve Hargreaves rang Fong, a call Fong secretly recorded. The heated talk highlighted Hargreaves’ concern about what he believed to be Fong’s underhanded move to spread word via a school email.
At the end of the conversation, Hargreaves offered to hear out Fong in six months and reconsider his business proposal then.
Hargreaves, who became the school’s principal last year, confirmed to the Herald that Fong had sent an email from another ex-student’s email address. He also confirmed the first email was deleted from the inbox of students, as was the email sent from Fong’s Gmail.
He was trying to find how Fong a mailing list that included so many students.
Hargreaves said Fong might have got the school mailing list after an email for a wellness survey was sent to all students last year. In a technical error, the email enabled students to reply and gain access to the school’s entire mailing list.
The school uniform shop was not being held to a monopoly by a single supplier, he said, and the school had looked into alternative options but had decided they were not reliable. Hargreaves added he had no idea his talk with Fong was recorded. “Look, if you are a professional that marketed your business legally and professionally then I would talk to you. But at the moment you just seem like some person who wants to muckrake and cause trouble,” he says in the recording.
College board of trustees chairman Richard Wilkie said students could sell second-hand uniforms through social media or other avenues, no one was limited to buying from the uniform shop.
He took Fong’s allegation that someone had threatened to deport him seriously and would investigate it: “We should see if that actually happened.”
The matter would be brought before the board for discussion today.
He also had concerns of a privacy breach over the use of the still-active school email.
“My view if a student is left, then he should have no more access.”