Six-year-old Jacob Mills painted his hand royal blue and slapped it against the cement wall.

“Cool,” he said.

He was among a handful of Lawrence children who spent their Saturday afternoon decorating the Broken Arrow Tunnel, which runs from West 27th Street to the parking lot of Broken Arrow School.

“I tried to do a turkey,” said Jacob, a first-grader.

The aroma of fresh paint wafted out of the underground walkway in southeast Lawrence that neighborhood students use to get to and from school so they don’t have to cross Louisiana Street.

Inappropriate comments and gang graffiti have notoriously littered the tunnel, said Kansas University student Amy Hill, one of a half-dozen interns from the Bert Nash Community Mental Health Center’s in-school Working to Recognize Alternative Possibilities counseling program, also known as WRAP, that organized the activity.

“A lot of stuff gets put up on the wall,” she said as a streak of gray paint dried on her right cheek. “That’s what we’re trying to eliminate, so that it’s a little bit more fun walking through there in the morning and the afternoon.”

The project was a part of the national Make a Difference Day, created by USA WEEKEND Magazine, where people around the country are encouraged to spend the fourth Saturday of each October helping others. Last year, 3 million Americans participated, according to organizers.

The WRAP interns, graduate students from Kansas and Washburn universities, spent the morning sweeping a bag full of trash out of the tunnel and painting the walls gray to give students neutral walls to embellish.

Never before had the walls been painted, except for patches of light blue paint used to cover graffiti, Hill said.

“We basically cleaned up the entire tunnel,” said Annie Dressel, another KU student. “It feels really good to know that we’re doing something to help out other people.”

Now, more appropriate graffiti covers the walkway, after Broken Arrow students painted pictures and scribed positive messages.

“You don’t have 2 do drugs 2 be cool,” one student wrote.

Local companies and the city of Lawrence donated paint and supplies for the project, Dressel said.

“We were very lucky, because without them we wouldn’t be able to be here today doing this,” she said. “It was a need of the community.”