MABTON -- Cassy Almaguer's hearing aids used to be her worst enemy. No one else needed them at her elementary school and bullies teased her enough that she would break the expensive little devices or intentionally lose them.
"When you're little, you don't expect to have hearing aids," said Almaguer, 18, whose family learned she had bilateral hearing loss when she was a toddler. "But I had to move on. I had to move forward."
Her hearing loss affected her speech, her ability to read and write, and most of all, her self-confidence. But Almaguer says thanks to a strong support system at home and in the Mabton public school system, she graduated on time, one of 50 in this year's graduating class at a ceremony Friday.
Almaguer said the bullying faded with age, but the older she got, the more stringent her curriculum became, and she felt herself falling behind. She told everyone she was dropping out, only she didn't realize no one would let her.
"I would come home and tell my stepdad 'I don't know how to do this,' " Almaguer said. "And he would say, 'You do know how to do it. You can do whatever you want if you set your mind to it.' "
Her life took another turn in November 2007, when her stepfather died of a heart attack.
Almaguer struggled with what would become of her life well into her junior year at Mabton High, when people such as her special education teacher put their foot down.
"I was hearing it every day from her," said Sue Sartain, Almaguer's special education teacher since the eighth grade. "I told her she wasn't going to quit."
Facing the home stretch of her high school career, Almaguer took their words to heart. She did better academically and chose to branch out, joining the school's girls basketball and volleyball teams for the 2010-11 seasons.
"I did things a different way, but they're the same things everyone else does," she said.
This fall, she will be worlds away, beginning her studies to become an emergency medical technician at North Seattle Community College.
"I wanted to help people," she said. "With this job, you're saving people's lives."
