By Tim Seyfert

Nearly two months after feeling pressured to drop out of the Los Altos School District Board race, 18-year-old Kevin Bella now says he’s worried about actually getting elected.

Bella, who graduated from Mountain View High School in June and recently started college at the University of California at Davis, admitted last week that the duties of serving on the school board “might be a little more than I could handle.”

“I didn’t really ever want to get elected. I’m not in this to win,” Bella said during a phone interview from his Davis dorm room.

“Being a full-time student, I wouldn’t be able to put in the time.”

The teen cited the long commute down to the Peninsula to attend the semimonthly school board meetings as his main hurdle.

Bella said he initially joined the race to bring attention to issues he felt “were not being addressed by the school board.” Among his concerns, Bella wanted to shed light on the need for more music and art classes, beef-ups to the district’s science departments and a scaling back of standardized testing.

“My goal was to inspire other young people to get politically involved and make them more aware of issues that concern them,” he said.

Bella was thrust into the media spotlight in August after Los Altos School District Superintendent Marge Gratiot informed him via telephone that his candidacy would force an election, costing the district at least $30,000.

Before Bella decided to pull election papers, there were only two candidates for the two-seat race. Having a third candidate meant the school district would have had to front the cash to fund an election.

Bella said his phone conversation with Gratiot prompted him to consider withdrawing his candidacy. That is, until a fourth candidate, Al Hill Jr., joined the race at the last minute, making concerns over Bella’s sparking a costly election moot.

Gratiot has since written a letter of apology to the teen and made a public apology at a school board meeting soon after the incident.

“It was a very dumb thing for me to have done, and I wish I hadn’t,” Gratiot wrote in an e-mail to the Town Crier last August.

After local publications began reporting on Bella’s conversation with Gratiot, the teen said he was besieged with phone calls, ranging from supporters urging him to stay in the race (including some offering to pledge money), to two political consultants proposing to run his campaign.

Bella said he plans to donate all of his campaign funds to the school district and focus on school full time.