Bella English’s excellent story about Belmont’s Burke family and their struggle to raise three lovely daughters who were born with Sanfilippo syndrome, a very rare and fatal degenerative brain disease, put a very human face on the otherwise sterile and bureaucratic machinations on Beacon Hill, where talk of “reductions in services” and “necessary cuts” often mask a more brutal reality. Without help from the State, the caseworkers and educators who help them shoulder the load of caring for three profoundly disabled children will disappear, the lives of families like the Burkes, already hard, will get much harder.