Since the government shutdown began on Oct. 1, 2025, many educational websites run by the government are out of date. These are any nonessential web pages ending in “.gov”. At Fishers High School, science curriculums are facing roadblocks due to the limited access to government resources online, which tend to be most accurate. 

“They are no longer maintained; you cannot find them,” said Oceanography teacher Daniel Reddan.

Two of Reddan’s course assignments have been disrupted because they both consisted of in-depth research over tides and deep ocean currents. Reddan uses the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Association (NOAA) website for these assignments.  

“NOAA is very accurate, very detailed and has great information,” said Reddan. 

While having an excused assignment can be agreeable to students, many online textbooks under government websites are also inaccessible. Being able to access professional textbooks online has made the days of carrying around twenty pounds of books at school an issue of the past. 

Senior Zach Webb is currently taking AP Physics C and has benefitted greatly from the online version of the class’ textbook.  

“Most of our work is online, but sometimes our teacher assigns work directly from the textbook,” Webb said. 

Another website out of order is the astronomy picture of the day. Astronomy teacher Marcy Clone has been showing this website to her students for around 20 years. The daily images can be of any sort of newsworthy occurrences in the sky such as meteor showers, planet information, galaxy features and high-resolution nebulae taken from the space telescopes we have active outside of Earth. 

“We are having two comets going through right now and we’re not getting any news about them because the astronomy picture of the day is down,” Clone said. 

The astronomy picture site has archives dating back to 2015. It was also halted due to the last government shutdown which lasted from December 22, 2018, to January 25, 2019. 

“NASA’s also shut down, and they do ‘What’s Up in the Sky?’ from the Jet Propulsion center,” Clone said. “So we did find out about the comets at the beginning of the month, before the shutdown, but they’re not going to have an update for us in November.” 

NASA is reportedly still launching space expeditions, but there is no coverage on it. Similarly, the NOAA is still running its hurricane forecasting, as it is an essential program, but it is unknown if some webpages will return when the government reopens.  

For now, education at Fishers must rely on alternative sources, but there are still many credible pages out there available to the public. Many astronomy news sources are independent from the government, so their sites are still updated each day.