In case you were wondering, it took the school 4 hours to count them all.

USA Today reports.

Student pays parking fines with 11,000 pennies in protest of funding allocations

Most students groan and begrudgingly pay (or procrastinate on paying) their parking tickets. But Stephen Coyle, a 26 year-old rising senior at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, decided to make a statement. And he did it with pennies.

The actuarial science student was fined $140 in parking tickets for illegal parking and using his friend’s parking pass, though the debt was reduced to $110 because he paid a ticket within a short period of time.

Coyle says the idea to pay his fines in pennies first came when he replied to an email from the university’s Parking Services.

What started as a joke became a plan after Coyle did some research into the school’s parking citations. In the process, he learned that 80% of UNC-Charlotte parking tickets fund local public schools, not the university.

“This got me thinking,” Coyle said in an email to USA TODAY College. “Why are college students — who are arguably one of the most fiscally challenged group of people — supplementing the funding of public schools when this is actually the responsibility of taxpayers?”

Coyle says he wanted to make his payment mean something — to highlight the lack of funding used toward UNC-Charlotte programs and buildings.