Education

Meet Jack, the Bartlett High meteorologist

Inside Anchorage's Bartlett High School on a recent morning, freshman Jack Pellerin held his weather script in one hand and a phone receiver in the other. He was about to start his broadcast to the entire school.

"Good Thursday morning, Bears," he said into the phone that's connected to the intercom. "Today is April 20, 2017. I'm meteorologist Jack Pellerin and well, another beautiful morning out there."

This school year, Jack launched Bartlett High's first weather segment. When he attended Begich Middle School, he did the same.

"We didn't have weather before him and we don't have weather now," said Brian Heckert, Begich's broadcast news teacher. "I don't know that anybody could do it quite like him."

Jack is a 14-year-old who wears glasses, has short brown hair, stands at 5 feet, 1 inch and loves the weather. He specifically likes the wind, and you can tell from the energetic way he speaks about it — it's as if each of his sentences ends in an exclamation point. He knows he wants to become a meteorologist one day, like the ones on TV who broadcast live in front of a blank green screen. He's getting all the experience he can now.

Standing in the Bartlett High office, Jack read from a piece of yellow paper. He had written his script in neat, careful print. He ran out of time when writing his lines that morning, but he said he has gotten a lot better at public speaking, so ad libbing was OK.

For about a minute, Jack told the school about current and incoming winds and pressure systems as well as temperatures, both the highs and the lows. He told them about the clear skies and the possibility for evening clouds. He read from the script, and when it ran out of words, he spoke from memory, recalling the weather reports he had viewed on his laptop at home before his mom drove him to school that morning.

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At 7:32 a.m. he smiled as he closed with his tagline: "Remember the sun always shines at Bartlett High. Go Bears!"

Jack's interest in weather and the wind started well before the morning announcements and middle school.

His mom, Katherine Pellerin, remembers him sitting and staring at fans at age 2 or 3. She remembers him running with pinwheels in the backyard. A doctor later screened Jack for autism, observing the boy at preschool where he sat alone, outside, staring up at the sky. Jack told the doctor, "I'm just looking at the wind," Katherine recalled.

Jack was diagnosed with autism, a range of conditions characterized by challenges with social skills, repetitive behaviors and communication. Katherine said she and her husband have always treated autism as an asset, and Jack sees it that way, too.

"We've raised him as if everybody has something. Sometimes they have it as a child, sometimes they have it as an adult. Sometimes it's a hardship, but sometimes our weaknesses and our strengths are exactly the same thing," she said. "And so, this seems to be his thing and we think that it's great and we think that it's going to be just fine."

Jack will tell you he has a medical diagnosis that leads to more narrow and extreme interests. That's why he likes the weather and the wind.

"I always get fired up when there's some sort of windstorm on the way," Jack said. "Wind is just my thing."

At home, Jack continues to monitor the weather. He has a weather station mounted to his family's roof in East Anchorage. It tells him wind speed, temperature, humidity and barometric pressure. He has an alarm set to sound if the wind speeds hit 50 mph, which he said has yet to happen. He briefly wondered if the jarring alarm would bother him if it went off in the middle of the night.

"But maybe I wouldn't mind because it would be about the wind," he concluded.

In his bedroom, Jack has several fans so he can simulate wind patterns. When it's windy outside, he likes to ride his bike, taking a camera or cellphone to film the weather. He prefers winds out of the east-southeast and south-southeast, because those can be the most severe. Yes, he knows that's really specific.

One day he hopes to go to Chicago — it's the windy city, after all.

Jack said it's hard to describe exactly what he loves about the wind, but he could probably boil it down to two things: He likes listening to the noise it makes when it blows through trees and watching how it makes objects move, like power lines, light poles and traffic lights. But like anything, too much of a good thing can get old, including a long-lasting windstorm.

"There are times, especially if the windstorm has been kind of long, where it's like, 'All right I'm done. I've been happy, so thanks for the windstorm, but now I'm done,' " he said. "It's almost like having Christmas on every day."

Katherine said Jack will comb weather predictions to see when wind will return to the forecast. He plots El Nino and La Nina patterns. He tells her about weather in Anchorage as well as tiny, remote Alaska communities.

She said she feels like the Anchorage School District has given her son an outlet for his passion and she credits the district with infusing her son with confidence and providing him with support.

"They have been our village," she said. "He's been so lucky. The school district has been absolutely wonderful to him. He's just the weather guy."

When Jack entered Bartlett High this school year, a teacher recommended to school principal Sean Prince that Jack announce the weather. Bartlett long had a student read through the morning announcements, including information about yearbook sales and spirit days, but never the weather, Prince said. Prince said he asked Jack in the hallway this past fall if he wanted to try out a weather broadcast and Jack hasn't stopped since.

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Sophomore Madison Xiong has read the general announcements since May 2016 and credited Jack with predicting this year's snow day. She said she didn't know too much about the weather until Jack's reports, but now she does. That is, unless Jack happens to miss school.

The one day he did, Madison said she told students to just look out the window.

But for Jack, that's no substitute. "There's no weather when the weatherman's not here," he said.

Tegan Hanlon

Tegan Hanlon was a reporter for the Anchorage Daily News between 2013 and 2019. She now reports for Alaska Public Media.

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