Even with declining enrollments....
The education budget will still go up.
The number of school employees will still go up.
If the district reported an enrollment of 900,000, but the true enrollment is 889,404 then there's a difference of 10,596 students. The article doesn't reveal what the schools get per student, but picking an arbitrary number of 30,000 per student, the fraud would be 317,880,000 dollars. It seems to me that it would be worthwhile for someone to come forth as a whistle blower if there were a substantial reward to be had for proving fraud.