Lifeboat ethics demand awful solutions like this. If the best school in the region is known to let this slide, it will be besieged by a population it won't have the resources to support. It's almost like tax evasion, only you're required to move before you'll be allowed to pay the tax, and that particular school is not in a position to fix that. The list of applicable laws must have been pretty short if they had to resort to "grand theft", and at that point the penalty was driven by the amount of money at issue, from a law mostly aimed at car thieves.