Christina Hulet has been chosen by the Bainbridge Island School Board to fill the seat left empty by the recent resignation of Tim Kinkead.

Hulet, one of seven candidates for the District No. 4 Director seat, was appointed to the position at a special school board meeting Tuesday.

“We are excited to welcome Christina to the board,” School Board President Sheila Jakubik said afterward.

Jakubik said the board was impressed by the high caliber of candidates. Seven islanders had submitted letters of interest for the position.

“We deliberated for quite a while,” Jakubik said. “But in the end, we felt like Christina’s skill set and her commitment to equity for all children made her the ideal choice.”

Hulet, who is a parent of an elementary school student in the Bainbridge district, served as former Governor Christine Gregoire’s Executive Health Care Policy Advisor in Washington state from 2005 to 2009. Hulet was responsible for developing the governor’s legislative and budget priorities and negotiating key policy issues with state agencies, the Legislature and a diverse group of stakeholders.

Prior to that, she was the process improvement manager at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. There, she implemented business and quality improvement initiatives to strengthen the hospital’s charity care mission.

Since 2012, Hulet has served as principal of Christina Hulet Consulting, which assists organizations in facilitating social change. Her family has lived on the island since the early 1990s.

She holds an MBA in sustainable business from Bainbridge Graduate Institute and a bachelor’s degree in public policy from Duke University.

Hulet will be sworn in at the Nov. 8 school board meeting. She will serve out the remainder of Kinkead’s term through November 2019.

The school board interviewed the seven candidates at Tuesday’s meeting before selecting Hulet.

The other applicants for the position were Roan Blacker, Andrew Ewing, Margaret Gaffney, Mark Longridge, Darrell Martin and Jennifer Solseng.

Blacker is a financial and management consultant and the district manager for Kitsap County Sewer District No. 7 and moved to Bainbridge in 2006. Ewing has lived on the island since 2012 and is a senior data scientist at iSpot.tv in Bellevue.

Gaffney is a 2016 island transplant from Ballard and works for the Gates Foundation. Longridge is a four-year Bainbridge resident and has worked in capital construction for public agencies for the past 23 years; the last 16 for the Port of Seattle where he is a capital project manager.

Martin works at One Strategic Capital, Inc. in Winslow and is currently studying for a stock broker’s license; his family has lived on Bainbridge for just over five years. Solseng, an island resident since 2001, is an attorney and the founder of the law firm Robison Tate.

Kinkead announced his resignation from the school board in September and stepped down earlier this month. He was the second-most senior member of the board, after Board Member Mike Spence.