ActionScript 3.0 :: Movie Clip Buttons Losing Buttonmode?

Basically I have an up and active state, and when the visitor clicks on a button and navigates that section of the site, I want the button to remain highlighted. In the AS2 days I would use gotoAndStop to jump to a frame labeled that area of the site. It worked fine, but using the same technique in AS3 causes an issue with buttons no longer activating as buttons.

Below is a brief example of my simple code. When the gotoAndStop jumps to the new section, I do replace the the up movie clip (such as people_mc in the example below) with another movie clip (such as peopleACTIVE_mc).

In this case if I had four buttons and clicked on the second button, the gotoAndStop would run as expected but the first button would no longer be an active button. If I hit the third button, then the first and second button are no longer active. And so on. What's odd is every button above the button being hit, such as button four, would still be recognized as a button.

stop();
people_mc.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, onClick_people);
places_mc.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, onClick_places);

[Code].....