With America's Got Talent behind them, Kolanie Marks and The Connection Performing Arts Center in Mukilteo are now focused on finding the next wave of talented young dancers who are eager to train.

The USS Abraham Lincoln passed by Mukilteo’s waterfront in the morning on Tuesday, Sept. 7, marking the ship’s departure from Naval Station Everett with the USS Momsen and USS Shoup.

Annamarie Cao, a fifth grader at Mukilteo Elementary, is the winner of Beacon Publishing’s first Mayor for a Day essay contest.

Argie Matugas, of Mukilteo, was diagnosed with two types of tumors within a matter of weeks in 2008. It was the wake-up call Matugas needed to start caring about her health again. Now, she eats right and exercises regularly – including training for and running in the 2010 Run-A-Muk 5K.

Kamiak High School recently won 5th Avenue Theatre’s top honor for high schools for Outstanding Overall Musical Production for “The Pajama Game.” With their performance of the 1954 musical “The Pajama Game,” a romantic comedy about workers in a pajama factory seeking a pay raise, Kamiak beat 64 other Washington state high schools during the awards ceremony held June 7 at Seattle’s 5th Avenue Theatre.

Before joining the Orca Company Navy Jr. ROTC at Mariner High School, Cadet Theresa Hofford was shy. She’d much rather be alone with a book than socializing with her peers. But now, thanks to the NJROTC program, she said she’s outgoing and makes friends.

Fourth-grader Johnny Lovick rolled out of bed in the early morning cold in his grandmother’s ramshackle home in the middle of a Louisiana cotton field. School wouldn’t start for hours, but in the dirt-poor South, everyone had a job to do, no matter how old or young. Cotton had to be picked and chopped, chores had to be done. No matter how cold or hot it was, no matter how miserable the boy felt, the work never stopped. With sparse food, no running water, no electricity, and an outhouse 100 feet away from the tiny sharecropper’s shack Lovick called home, life looked bleak.

Sno-Isle Tech’s fashion show was a success, with students modeling a variety of designer clothing, of their own inventions created throughout the school year.

Discovery second grader Pierce McVey thought it would be cool if he and his fellow students answered 1,000,000 math problems in just a few weeks’ time. Never mind that that works out to about 1,689 problems per student among him and his 591 classmates. “I got the idea from a book I read,” he said. “The kid in the book challenged his school, so I knew I could do it here, that we could do this.”