Our family has recently recently been "a guinea pig in a new program".
Our county started a new gifted middle school this year-- we were reluctant to sign on because so much was still undecided as of last spring, and ds ultimately went for a different magnet program (not specifically gifted) with a proven track record. His best friends went for the gifted magnet, and after six weeks of hearing how cool it was, ds transferred.
Yeah, well...we've since pulled him out again (as have at least seven other families out of eighty). The disorganization is not so apparent on the surface, but it's there. Things that were promised (Chinese or Japanese for the foreign language) are not followed through; favoritism toward the small core of families who belong to a specific gifted parents' group is rampant.
Not to say that all start-ups are like this. But an awful lot of them seem to be.
