BLACKFOOT — McKayleigh Wasia is easy to talk to.

The 17-year-old has plenty of interests and hobbies. She’ll talk about her family’s farm outside of Blackfoot, where she helps take care of the horses, cows and chickens.

She’ll talk about her plans after graduating from Snake River High School (college in Utah or Idaho to become a pediatrician) or movies she’s seen recently — she performed a song from “The Greatest Showman” in the Snake River Distinguished Young Woman pageant earlier this year.

The conversations flow easily. As long as you’re looking at her, you’d never know that she isn’t actually listening to what you’re saying most of the time. She’s reading your lips. And her performance in the talent show wasn’t singing, it was signing.

McKayleigh has had severe hearing loss for her entire life.

“If I’m not looking at a person, it’s really muffled, and I can’t hear a lot of what they say,” McKayleigh said.

The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders reports 13 percent of Americans aged 12 years or older have hearing loss in both ears, based on standard hearing examinations.

McKayleigh was born with hearing loss in both ears, with her left one having a majority of the damage. Her parents noticed that she ignored what they said when she was young but didn’t know why. She had secretly picked up the ability to lip read to communicate as easily as her parents and older brothers did.

Her mother, Ashley Wasia, was stunned when her daughter failed a hearing test in fourth grade, and they finally discovered what was wrong.

“It was heartbreaking, as a parent, to finally realize what was going on. She took it better than I did,” Ashley said.

Tubes were surgically installed in McKayleigh’s ears soon after that to stabilize her. Since then she’s undergone a number of other surgeries as her hearing slowly worsened.

After the diagnosis was made, McKayleigh began spending time with another student who had even worse hearing loss. She started picking up sign language from her and continued learning more phrases on her own from YouTube videos.

“It’s a beautiful language. I kind of envy those (with complete deafness) because it’s an amazing thing to be vocal and happy in a silent world,” McKayleigh said.

Ashley said her daughter had a “natural talent” for the language. The rest of the Wasias have tried to pick up sign language over the years but have struggled more with it than McKayleigh.

Mastering the language also is a precaution for her. If her hearing keeps getting worse, it may impact her ability to speak and participate in conversations.

Her inner ear damage has also led to other side effects and problems, including seizures when the sounds around her became too overwhelming. She went through another surgery earlier this month, a major procedure to see if repairing damage to her septum will help stabilize the tunnels in her ears.

It wasn’t until last year that she started taking actual classes in sign language, which were offered remotely from Brigham Young University-Idaho. Those classes are being paid for by the Idaho Educational Services for the Deaf and the Blind, the nonprofit that manages the Idaho School for the Deaf and the Blind outside of Gooding.

In June, she’ll begin taking part in the group’s other key outreach program for students like her: the Work Readiness Camp. The annual weeklong camp, which is being held at the College of Southern Idaho, gathers high school students who are deaf and hard-of-hearing together to teach the necessary skills to prepare for life after graduation.

Camp Director Kristy Buffington said the group planned to have 36 students come through, a record-high number, to improve their confidence so they can support themselves more easily.

“We teach them all the same things. They all need to learn about and practice self-advocacy to prepare for the future,” Buffington said.

McKayleigh has learned to advocate for herself at school and at home. But she has become especially vocal on the issue of advocating for those with hearing loss since last summer, when the damage reached the point that she was prescribed hearing aids for the first time.

The hearing aids made a big difference to her ability to listen, but after years of being able to get along without any visual clues of her impairment, she was reluctant to wear them.

“I didn’t want to do anything. I didn’t want to show people at school that I needed hearing aids,” McKayleigh said.

It took several months for her to get comfortable wearing the aids at school. The device doesn’t allow for perfect hearing; she said the school intercom often sounds like static and she can only really focus on one voice at a time. They were too large to fit under her softball helmet when she played in school games.

When she got used to the hearing aids, though, McKayleigh started becoming a more active advocate for herself and other students around her. Some teachers began wearing ConnectClips, mini microphones that would pick up their voice and funnel it directly into the hearing aids.

McKayleigh spent time with the young daughter of one of her teachers to make the girl feel better about her own hearing loss.

That kind of community can also make a big difference for students, Buffington said, which is why the camp gathered students from across Idaho.

“For many students, they may be the only student in their school with hearing loss. They might not know any other students in the area with hearing loss,” she said.

The efforts to prepare the students for their future extend continue after they return home from the week of lessons at the Work Readiness Camp. Each student also will receive four weeks of practical work experience at a business in their hometown.

The students will earn minimum wage while working at ranches, libraries, grocery stores and any other business that the camp is able to pair them with.

McKayleigh doesn’t yet know where she will be working for the camp. She hopes to pursue a medical degree in college while becoming fluent in sign language, so she requested to work with nearby medical offices. Buffington said the program takes the students’ requests into account while placing them with summer employers.

McKayleigh said she was excited about both the work experience and the chance to connect with more students her age.

“They said that they’ll try to make it fun, but they’re going to push us to get outside of our comfort zones,” she said.