The former head of a Halifax County school for troubled boys said his case won't end with Thursday's sentence of 2¹₂ years in federal prison.

Robert Serge Gluhareff, who pleaded guilty to fraud this spring, said he hopes he can appeal.

"The purposes for our school were pure," he insisted after his sentencing hearing. "It was a ministry."

From its start in the late 1980s until its sudden closing after the 2003 spring break, Wellspring Academy touted the Christian foundation of its programs for youth with behavioral and academic problems. Its approach drew both letters of support from parents and an investigation of child abuse that ultimately concluded that complaints were unfounded.

Gluhareff, now 62, was the school's founder and a minister and counselor with a practice in Raleigh, N.C. He was accused of propping up Wellspring's finances during its final years by depositing bad checks from his own accounts and tuition checks that he knew parents could not cover because they had not yet received loans, giving parents letters that portrayed tuition payments as donations in order to gain matching contributions from the parents' employers, and telling parents that if they paid tuition early they could claim it as a tax deduction.

Speaking in court Thursday, Gluhareff's attorney Kenneth Bell noted his client ran up his own credit cards with school expenses too.

"He was taking from the left hand to pay the right to try to keep the school open," Bell said.

When Gluhareff pleaded guilty to two charges related to bank fraud, and one each to mail and tax fraud, another 49 charges were dismissed. His plea agreement set a sentencing range of 27 to 33 months, and U.S. District Judge Samuel Wilson imposed a term of 30 months.

Wilson also ordered Gluhareff to pay more than $500,000 in restitution, much of it to the government to cover taxes lost through parents' bogus deductions. Both prosecution and defense attorneys said it was unlikely Gluhareff would be able to pay the court-ordered debt.

Parents who paid tuition in advance of the school's shutdown were not included in the repayment plan.

Throughout his case, Gluhareff said he sparred with Assistant U.S. Attorney Jennie Waering and with investigators. He wrote letters to a long list of state and federal authorities saying the investigation was out of control and had overstepped its bounds.

After Thursday's sentencing, Gluhareff said he hoped to pursue an appeal on the basis of abuse of the grand jury process, saying that when he spoke to the grand jury that ultimately indicted him, he was not allowed to make a complete statement or bring witnesses.

Reached late Thursday, Waering noted that Gluhareff gave up most of his appeal rights in his plea agreement.

The agreement says that Gluhareff can appeal only on the grounds of ineffective representation by his attorney or prosecutorial misconduct -- and then only if he did not know about the misconduct at the time of his plea.

Gluhareff said the investigation should have focused on a school employee who took four students to her home and contacted parents to say the boys had been mistreated.

E-mails began to fly among parents of other students, and as news spread on campus, students began running amok to the point that Gluhareff said he called in sheriff's deputies to keep order as he began what he thought would be a temporary closure.

At its height, Wellspring had about 90 students and 61 staff members, Gluhareff said.

Tuition was $49,000 per year -- a figure Gluhareff said was well below market rate for similar facilities -- although most students were on full or partial scholarships.

Speaking after his hearing, Gluhareff described the bulk of his offenses as "simple check kiting" and said it had been poor judgment not to raise tuition instead of turning to the methods that landed him in court.

Asked what he would say to parents who lost money when the school closed, Gluhareff didn't pause.

"I didn't close the school," he said.