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WASHINGTON The Wikipedia biography of Sen. Roy Blunt, who has been receiving high volumes of social media protests over his plan to vote for Donald Trumps education secretary nominee, was temporarily changed to cast Blunts support for that nominee in a negative light.

The Missouri Republican has said he will vote for Betsy DeVos, the former Michigan Republican Party chair, whose views on charter schools and public education have drawn intense opposition from some educators and teachers unions. The vote is expected sometime Tuesday in the Senate and could be very close.

Two Republicans Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine have said they will oppose DeVos. That means that the best-case scenario for Trump to get his nominee through would come on a tie-breaking vote by Vice President Mike Pence.

Democrats have been trying to put pressure on one Republican to flip. On Monday, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., on the Senate floor urged opponents to "keep making your voices heard" and said Senate Democrats would "double down" to try to get one more Republican to vote with them.

On Friday, two passages were added to Blunts biography on Wikipedia, an open-content, online encyclopedia. Wikipedia requires registration to begin an entry but not to edit one. The same unidentified user apparently added both lines, according to Wikipedia logs.

In a session about Blunts early life and pre-Washington career, one that mentioned his presidency of Southwest Baptist University, this line was added:

Mr. Blunt so despised his tenure in education that he supported the 2017 nomination of Betsy DeVos.

Later, a new section titled, Controversy, the following language was added:

In 2017, Senator Blunt faced backlash for his support of Betsy DeVos' nomination as Secretary of Education. DeVos and her organization All Children Matter contributed a total of at least $234,352.33 to the Senator and his causes. Despite her unpopularity and lack of experience in educational roles, Blunt declared his intention to support her candidacy. This resulted in thousands of constituents submitting their written and verbal disagreements.

About an hour after a story on the edits appeared in the Post-Dispatch, those passages were removed.

The source given for the amount of money was from an anti-Blunt blog post by a former teacherand journalist, and actually said that Blunt had received about $38,000 from DeVos or members of her family over multiple elections. The bulk of the larger figure was from a DeVos-supported activist group reported spending against Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., when McCaskill ran for governor against Roy Blunt's son, Matt, in 2004

Matt Blunt won that election by about 3 percentage points.

Sen. Roy Blunts Facebook page has lit up with opposition to the nomination, with many of the nearly 2,000 comments on a recent thread referring to opposition to either DeVos or Trump adviser Steve Bannon. Others opposing DeVos have been calling his Senate offices. And protesters against Trump's policies and nominees have gathered near Blunt's offices in the state.

Our offices, and all congressional offices, are seeing large call volumes that oppose the current administration on several issues, Blunt's communications director, Brian Hart, said. We have also seen increased efforts by support groups to call in as well.

Hart told the Post-Dispatch that the new material on Wikipedia breaks the rules of the site because it does not provide sources for the first claim, and that it is not objective in that it appears to copy an anti-Blunt blog post in the second.

Hart predicted the two recently added passages will likely be challenged and removed because of that lack of sourcing.

He said he and other members of Blunts Senate office are prohibited, by Wikipedia rules, from removing the material he considers incorrect. Otherwise we would help on a host of things that are posted incorrectly, Hart said.

Last week, Blunt, who chairs a Senate Appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over the Department of Education, issued this statement when he announced he would support DeVos:

I believe Betsy DeVos understands that decisions about education need to be made much closer to where kids are. I look forward to working with her to find ways to get those decisions back to local school boards, and moms and dads.

All Senate Democrats and independents, including Sens. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo.; Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill.; and Dick Durbin, D-Ill.; are expected to vote against DeVos.

In an email to supporters and potential donors last week, McCaskill wrote: Betsy DeVos never attended a public school. Shes never worked at a public school. She likes to talk about siphoning resources away from public schools so families have a choice but in rural Missouri, good public schools are often the only choice families have. Our small towns dont have the kinds of options available in urban centers.

Teachers opposed to DeVos were picketing outside Blunts Columbia office on Monday, during lunchtime on a professional development day.

I have colleagues who have never even called their representative or sent a letter suddenly every single teacher at my lunch table has done those things, MacKenzie Everett-Kennedy, an English teacher at Columbia's Hickman High School, said while protesting outside Blunts office there.

Everett-Kennedy said she and her fellow teachers watched DeVos confirmation hearing and that she was rankled that DeVos, who did not attend public school, seemed unfamiliar with testing standards or federal laws on educating people with disabilities. During her hearing, DeVos also said the federal government should let districts decide whether to allow guns in schools, for instance to protect from potential grizzlies.

I teach high school where I have the six-foot-tall football players who can overpower me. I dont want a gun in my classroom but she thinks bears are a concern, Everett-Kennedy said, adding that Blunts support for DeVos in spite of educators concerns is deeply insulting for the teachers in this state, especially considering he himself was a teacher.

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Blunt's Wikipedia page briefly changed to attack his support of DeVos as education secretary - STLtoday.com