As Des Moines’ first public charter school gets ready to take another step toward opening its doors, a group of 100 students might just find their own Superman.

The documentary “Waiting for Superman,” which follows five students who come from low-income areas as they try to make it through an imperfect educational system, hit theaters last month. Kittie Weston-Knauer hopes the charter school can be that Superman.

The school is scheduled to be open for classes on Jan. 18 in the Pace Juvenile Center building downtown. All that is left is to find students.

That will come down to a weighted lottery in early November. There will be 50 seventh-graders and 50 eighth-graders selected for the inaugural class, with preference given to students who fit a list of criteria.

“Because we can only take 100 students, we want to make sure to target the right students, and those are the students most likely to fail,” said Weston-Knauer, a former Des Moines Independent Community School District principal who is in charge of planning the charter school. “It doesn’t take students until high school to decide they are going to drop out.”

Students will be chosen, she said, based on several factors: scores on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, use of free or reduced-price lunches, low grades, bad attendance and behavior issues.

Any seventh- or eighth-grader is eligible to apply, and every name will be entered into the drawing. For each extra factor the student meets, his or her name will be entered again, giving the students who most need extra help the best chance to get it.

Once students are selected, the school will put them on a 10-year plan, under which the students will go through six years of schooling and then be monitored and offered help for the next four years.

The curriculum will be a little more demanding than a normal public school, Weston-Knauer said. Students will not only work on core classes such as science and math, or reading, language arts and social studies, in the same time block with teachers who are collaborating on their material.

They will also have a block of time for a class that Weston-Knauer refers to as a big picture class, where the school hopes to utilize the “best and greatest minds” in the downtown community.