DON’T FORGET TO FEED IT! A summer art class at DeLong Middle School transformed old parking meters into artwork, including a lion, a fairy tree, and Squidward from SpongeBob (both below).

What does an old parking meter look like to you? Other than, you know, an old parking meter?

For a summer class of Eau Claire middle schoolers, parking meters looked like wild animals, a fantastical fairy tree, and a cartoon octopus. And with some art supplies, a little welding, and a lot of imagination, some cast-off city parking meters became these things – and more.

Upon inspection, a dull, gray parking meter’s true identity revealed itself to eighth grader Danielle Schlosser. “The top right here” – she pointed the curved area holding the red TIME EXPIRED indicator – “looked like Squidward,” she explained. And with some blue-green paint, a tiny shirt, plastic tentacles, and a bit of engineering ingenuity, Danielle was able to bring the SpongeBob SquarePants character to life.

Fellow eighth-grader Reva Syverson looked at an identical meter and saw something utterly different. “The pole is like the long neck of a giraffe,” she explained, describing her team’s artwork, a metal incarnation of the African animal.

The girls was among a dozen students who created sculptures, which also included a lion, an alien, and a whimsical, flower-bedecked tree with wire branches.

The unusual art projects came about through a partnership between the Sculpture Tour Eau Claire, several donors, and DeLong Middle School art teacher Ann Oberding. After DeLong was approached by Michelle Koehn, the sculpture tour’s executive director, Oberding extended a summer ceramics class for four weeks to give kids a chance to turn the meters into art for the community.

“It was something that we don’t ordinarily get to work on,” Oberding said on a recent Thursday morning as her students put the finishing touches on the repurposed coin-collecting devices. “We can work inside the classroom and make public art, and most students don’t get that opportunity.”

Koehn now hopes to put the completed sculptures on public display. Because some of them include fragile elements such as fabric, they’ll likely have to find a home indoors.

Koehn came up with the idea for the collaborative project earlier this year when she saw a news report about the city’s removal of parking meters from some downtown streets. She contacted Leah Ness, city traffic engineer, who said the city was willing to donate the old meters. Next, Koehn pursued (and received) grants from the Eau Claire Community Foundation and the Wisconsin Arts Board to fund the project. Finally, she connected with DeLong, then brought the meters – as well as local sculptor Mark Blaskey – to Oberding’s classroom in July. The students talked with Blaskey about the meters’ artistic potential, then brainstormed ideas and got to work. They were helped along the way by Northwest Enterprises (which sandblasted the meters and welded on bases and other extra pieces, such as Squidward’s wide mouth) and HSHS Sacred Heart Hospital (which fueled the young artists’ work with donated lunches).

“This was an incredible endeavor,” Koehn told the students at the conclusion of the project. “I know when we brought (the parking meters) here four weeks ago, the question was, ‘What do you want us to do?’ ”

The students answered that question with a flurry of imagination and determination. As Danielle, Squidward’s creator, put it, “I think I learned when something doesn’t work the first time, you have to keep going.”