Ric Averill plays his banjo and sings while leading students from Central Junior High School to Liberty Hall after classes Wednesday for the Wednesdays @ Liberty Hall kickoff party. Wednesdays @ Liberty Hall provides activities for junior high school students when they are released early on Wednesdays.

When the school bell rings at Lawrence junior high schools on early-dismissal Wednesdays, students are free to head any direction they please.

Members of the GaDuGi SafeCenter hope to guide youngsters to Liberty Hall, 644 Mass.

The agency is providing an after-school program in a supervised and structured environment, said Christie Dobson, youth and adult outreach coordinator for GaDuGi, an organization that promotes violence prevention.

Last year, the United Way awarded the center a three-year Community Impact Grant to begin the Wednesdays @ Liberty Hall program, which started its second year Wednesday.

More than 20 community agencies partner with the center to provide activities, prevention and education programs, and free food.

“For some kids, it probably keeps them out of trouble,” said Matt Pfannenstiel, 12, who visited Liberty Hall on Wednesday afternoon.

Dobson said prevention is critical at this age.

“It’s a good time for them to be around cool adults and get some questions answered and have material offered to them in a cool way,” she said.

Maggie Bixler, program coordinator, said the goals are “really to empower them to make positive choices, to build healthy relationships with adults and feel like they have a strong sense of community, like the people within the community care about them.”

Students were escorted to this week’s event from Central Junior High by Ric Averill, Lawrence Arts Center drama director. He played a banjo along the way and sang with the students on their walk.

Once at Liberty Hall, students dug into free pizza and some learned to juggle or fence.

Later, about 15 students helped paint the Aaron Douglas community mural on the northern wall of the Aquila natural gas building at the northeast corner of Ninth and New Hampshire streets.