Jon Rice called the state's expert on teaching really smart kids a few months ago and poured out his deepest worries.

His 10-year-old daughter had just finished eighth grade, and she wanted to go to high school.

"Shouldn't I just let her be a kid?" he asked.

When he hung up, Rice told his wife, Christy, what the couple already knew in their hearts.

Their little girl's thirst for knowledge was so great and so advanced that keeping her out of high school would be a pointless effort to stall a process they had never controlled in the first place. So, Macyn Rice, who shares a sea-theme bedroom with her 4-year-old sister, still has some of her baby teeth and is six years away from getting her driver's license, will start ninth grade at Cumberland Valley High School on Wednesday.

"I'm going to feel like an ant," said Macyn, who stands 4-foot-3 and weighs 50 pounds.

She said she knows other students will gawk and that she will be an outsider, at least at first. That happened during a May tour.

Upperclassmen got wind of her visit by the end of first period, said brother, Zachare, 17, who will be a CV senior. "They said, 'I hear she's 10 years old. Is she really that smart?' " he said.

Actually, yeah, he told them.

"She's taking math I took last year," said Zachare, who also is a gifted student.

Along with honors precalculus, Macyn will take history, English, German and two honors science classes.

The state Department of Education doesn't track the number of students who start high school early. But Richard Miller, a state expert of gifted education, said she would be in a relatively small group.

Zachare will drive his sister to school, but then she'll be on her own.

"He's going to be in the whole other side of the school. I'm going to be alone," Macyn said.

Won't that be too much for a kid whose age peers will be in fifth grade?

"It flies in the face of many things we do in public education," Miller said. "People might say she's going to miss her childhood."

But this is Macyn's childhood. "Gifted kids benefit from being able to advance according to their ability," Miller said.

What about the social challenges?

"She knows kids can be mean. Her first day [of her spring visit], she got made fun of," Christy Rice said.

Macyn, a talkative girl who smiles often and laughs easily, ignored the initial teasing.

"The first day, everyone's like, 'What are you doing here?' By the third day, they were like, 'Hey, can I get a picture with you?' They'd take out notebooks and ask for my autograph. Most kids were nice," she said.

Macyn doesn't show a trace of conceit.

She isn't going to high school because she thinks she's better than other 10-year-olds.

"It's not that I love the idea. I just want to get this done," she said.

Being profoundly mentally gifted is no big deal to Macyn, even if her parents are still adjusting.

Former gifted students themselves, Jon, a department manager for an engineering firm, and Christy, who supplies in-home care for the ill and elderly and has operated a dance studio, knew early that their daughter was precocious.

They do not share their daughter's IQ, but said, "The saying between us was, 'She's a sponge,' " Jon Rice said.

Macyn, who is called 'Macy" by her parents, brother and sister Marah, 4, started kindergarten at a private school at age 4. Teachers said she was ready for fifth-grade work. The next year, she went to second grade at a public school. She received half-hour-a-week gifted services, despite testing on a seventh-grade level. Her parents took her out at Christmas.

"I haven't been in a real school since I was 5," Macyn said.

Instead, she zoomed through a virtual, charter school. Although Macyn's classes came through the Internet at home, her parents don't teach her.

She took first place in her school's science fair last spring. Her entry tried to refute two Notre Dame scientists' explanation for a noted tendency of children born in winter to be less healthy and less smart. She filled columns with data she gathered on her own.

"Macy got ticked off because she's a winter baby," Christy Rice said.

While she and her husband have learned that they help Macyn most by letting her decide what to learn, they did give her a crash course on dating, drugs and other topics she'll likely hear discussed in CV's classrooms and cafeteria.

Christy said she wants her daughter to have as close to a normal high school experience as possible.

"I want her to go to the prom," she said.