BENTONVILLE — Ben Girdner liked what he heard about Northwest Arkansas Classical Academy, the new charter school planning to open this fall in Bentonville.

“I was attracted to the curriculum,” Girdner said. “They teach knowledge is its own reward.”

Girdner applied to get both of his children, a kindergartner and a first-grader at Bentonville’s Willowbrook Elementary, into the charter school. He was one of several dozen parents who turned out Friday night for a lottery the school held at NorthWest Arkansas Community College to determine which kids it would enroll and which kids would be placed on a waiting list.

The lottery was necessary because the school received more than 900 applications for 445 slots in kindergarten through eighth grade. That was the most applications received for the first year of any charter school run by Responsive Education Solutions, a Texas-based organization that oversees 60 schools in Texas, according to school officials.

Families who had submitted applications were not required to attend the lottery in order to be part of it.

The school turned over the lottery process to Michael Crouch, a school performance evaluator from the Office for Education Policy at the University of Arkansas. As families watched, Crouch used the computer program Excel to randomly assign each applicant a number that ultimately determined which ones would be offered admission. The lottery was conducted by grade level.

A technical glitch occurred while Crouch was running the third-grade lottery. The process had to be done three times at that level because the order of names was lost when it was transferred from the computer to the printer. That left a few parents fuming, because the auditorium’s projection screen initially showed their children had made the cut.

Third grade happened to be the level for which the school received the most applications. There were 118 applications for 46 third-grade slots.

Crouch apologized to the families affected by the glitch. The lottery went smoothly for the other eight grade levels.

Aimee Barker, a parent of three children in the Rogers Public Schools, got the news her third-grader and sixth-grader would be offered admission to the charter school.

Barker said attendance boundary changes in the Rogers School District and a desire for her children to get a more challenging curriculum led her to Northwest Arkansas Classical Academy.

“This seemed like the best option for them,” Barker said.

Melanie Sutton also got good news. Her son, a third-grader at Sugar Creek Elementary in Bentonville, was successful in getting one of the fourth-grade slots. Her son chose to apply, she said.

“We felt like the smaller environment and the school’s curriculum were an advantage,” Sutton said.

She said they’ve experienced no displeasure with the Bentonville School District, however.

Eswara Balagam, a longtime Bentonville resident, has a daughter in the second grade at Willowbrook Elementary. He had heard good things from friends about the Texas schools run by Responsive Education Solutions, so he put in an application for his daughter.

Though she was placed on the waiting list, Balagam didn’t seem too disappointed.

“The school she’s going to is also very good,” he said, referring to Willowbrook.

Northwest Arkansas Classical Academy officials plan to add one grade level every year until it reaches grade 12.

The school does not have a headmaster yet, but officials are in the final stages of selecting one, said Scott Davis, regional director of classical schools for Responsive Education Solutions.