Painting a high school, assembling desks and playing duck, duck, goose with kids doesn’t seem like it would be the ideal vacation for a high school student, but that’s exactly what Cape Elizabeth senior Marianna Millar did this February on what she calls her favorite trip ever.

“It was an experience I’ll never forget,” she said.

Millar and 18 other students from Cape Elizabeth High School traveled to Puriscal County, Costa Rica, to spend a week repainting a school, digging up an organic garden, learning about sustainable living and interacting with local children.

Rob Rice, a sophmore, said he doesn’t know if he’ll ever be able to go back to lounging poolside at cushy hotels after his experience in Costa Rica. “I liked it a lot more,” he said.

Community service has become an increasingly popular pastime among teenagers and young adults. According to Bob Grimm, director of research and policy development at the Washington, D.C.-based Corporation for National and Community Service, the number of 16- to 19-year-olds who volunteer has doubled between 1989 and 2005. A major driving force behind the trend, he said, is that “schools have embraced service and service-learning.”

In January, Maine Public Broadcasting aired a program called “Generation Next,” for which journalist Judy Woodruff spent a year traveling around the country interviewing members of this generation – people from 16 to 25 years old. According to Woodruff, “Today’s young people have been required to volunteer from an early age by both parents and schools.” Woodruff said that 80 percent of “Generation Next” has volunteered in some form. And local students are no exception. In an ongoing series of stories, The Current is examining the interests, concerns, passions and trends of members of this generation in Scarborough, Cape Elizabeth and South Portland.

“Community service has become the thing to do,” said Bryant Shannon, vice president of the Scarborough High School Key Club. Just during his four years in high school, Shannon, a senior, has seen the growth of community service first hand. “When I joined as a freshman, the Key Club was half the size it is today,” he said. The Key Club is a national high school service organization.

According to the club’s faculty adviser, Christy Zavasnik, membership went up by 70 students in just the past year. Currently, the Key Club has 250 members, which is a quarter of the high school’s student body.

While the the competitiveness of college admissions may be an initial incentive for some students, it’s not driving the trend, say experts.

“I think a lot of kids know that colleges want a well-rounded student,” said Tricia Weyand, college placement officer at Scarborough High School, but “a lot of kids at this age really want to make a difference.”

Shannon said some students might join the Key Club to add it to their resume, but once they start volunteering, “they get hooked on it,” he said. Also, with 50 hours of service per year required of Key Club members, it’s not something students can fake.

But even if students were dragging themselves to soup kitchens throughout high school just to land a spot at the college of their dreams, they’d likely drop the act the day they set foot in the dorm. However, Grimm said, volunteering among college students increased by 20 percent between 2002 and 2005.

“People volunteer for a variety of reasons,” Grimm said, “but if it produces a positive output in the end, that’s what we should focus on.”

Grimm said he has heard a number of reasons explaining the growing trend in volunteering among teenagers. “There are some arguments that historical events of the past decade have had an effect on the young people,” he said, citing the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina as catastrophes that have “galvanized youth into being more involved in their community.”

These incidents, however, may not have worked so much as a scare tactic, as they did in providing a gateway for teenagers to gain interest and awareness of world affairs.

“A lot of it is that people watch the news and have a more global view and want to give back,” Millar said.

Carrie Apanovitch, a history teacher at Cape Elizabeth High School and a leader for the Costa Rica trip, said it would be “a huge oversight” to think that high school students volunteer their time for personal gain – she certainly didn’t see evidence of that in the group of students she traveled with.

“We had a vacation, and got something good out of it, too,” said sophomore Steve Janick.

“They really wanted to finish the school project and they really wanted to make a difference,” said Apanovitch, and that didn’t stop once they got off the plane. She said the students wanted to collect sports equipment to send back to the Costa Rican kids they met and to start a sustainability club in their school. They wanted to “continue what they started there and bring more people in,” Apanovitch said.

Sharon Merrill, director of guidance at Cape Elizabeth High School agreed. “These young people seem to be really wanting to do these things,” she said. “I think it’s really wonderful for many of our students to whom so much is given to really want to give back.”

Sometimes it’s just that simple. Scarborough High School freshman Jenny Snyder said the reason she joined the Key Club was that “it’s nice to help out everyone in the community.”

Scarborough High School Principal Pat Conant said she was recently approached by a Scarborough resident who had a suggestion for how high school students could fulfill their community service requirement.

“We don’t have a community service requirement,” she told him, but the resident insisted that was impossible, because he sees high school students volunteering around town all the time. Conant couldn’t have been prouder.

“They’re doing it because they want to, not because they have to,” she said. “That’s powerful to me.”