Was your gifted program just a class of high performing students or was it a group of people who scored 130+ on IQ tests?
Mine was the latter and we only had 7 ppl, while for some people (i guess) gifted was for people who did well in classes.
Which was yours?
Mine was just an opt-in at the start of the year, if you did good in the honors courses Freshmen/Sophomore year you would be allowed to take AP courses Juinor/Senior year. Presumably if you did poorly they would bump you down, but I did terribly (on account of not doing homework) and they never did, so you would have had to really blow things off to get bumped.