In 2011 the Austin school district contracted with IDEA to take over Allan Elementary, a school with a 95% low-income student population, and run it as an in-district public charter school starting with the 2012 school year. However many parents and an offshoot of the Occupy Austin protest group opposed the plan, claiming that the school was being used as an experiment to create education reform in the city. Many parents withdrew their children from the school, and IDEA had to recruit from outside the neighborhood and even outside of East Austin to get students. The school district cancelled the contract in 2012, and IDEA opened a new school in its own IDEA school district and on its own land about nine miles south of the Allen. About 80% of the students elected to go to the IDEA school starting in 2013, leaving Allan Elementary empty and unused and taking about $60 million over the subsequent seven years out of the Austin school district.