The food pantry at Kent Social Services is filling up nicely thanks to a food drive organized and run by students at Kent State University.

The students in Deric Kenne's spring course in the College of Public Health performed one of their last acts Thursday in a semester-long project to raise food donations for Kent's food pantry.

With the help of volunteers, the students dropped off about 1,300 empty grocery bags on doorsteps around the city in March. Their goal was to get residents to fill the bags with donations, which the students then picked up a few days later.

Kenne said they initially wanted to drop 2,500 empty grocery bags throughout the city, but they were still pleased with the effort after only delivering about half that amount.

"The College of Public Health, the students and myself are especially excited to have been part of a project for a great cause with what is clearly a great agency," Kenne said.

All total, the project raised 4,562 items for the food pantry. Of those, 2,639 came directly from the bag drop, while 1,012 items came from faculty and staff members at Kent State who contributed and university residence halls accounted for 911 of the items donated. The items were loaded into a truck Thursday morning and taken to the food pantry.

Christie Anderson, the director of Kent Social Services, said the food pantry has received about 5,200 pounds of food donations so far this year. In all of 2011 the pantry received 6,000 pounds of donations.

"So with this donation we expect to go over that," Anderson said. "It's an incredible amount of food."

Anderson said the donation from the health college food drive is the single largest one-time donation made to the food pantry in her two years there.

The agency plans to weigh the donations from Kenne's class to find out just how many pounds the 4,500 items amount to.

The food drive was just one of two large efforts made this spring, as Kent Mayor Jerry Fiala and Ravenna Mayor Joe Bica competed to raise food for the neighboring cities' pantries.

Kenne said the success of this year's food drive at the health college will likely lead to a repeat performance.