For a few hours last week, the passion for justice trumped the pursuit of power on Beacon Hill. It's not at all clear that the phenomenon will survive the holiday weekend.

The new fiscal year began in Massachusetts with no agreement on a state budget. The House and Senate are at odds over special education.

That the terms for providing services to the most vulnerable students are caught up in budget deliberations at all is testament to the iron rule of House Speaker Thomas M. Finneran. Rather than take his chances on an open debate, Finneran tacked language gutting special ed onto the omnibus budget bill. A pliant House membership simply fell in line.

Clearly, Finneran calculates that the Senate will acquiesce to his demands on special ed rather than risk a repetition of the embarrassing delays that last year resulted in a budget being delivered to the governor's desk more than four months late. Had he attended the closed-door Senate caucus on Thursday, however, Finneran might be less confident.

The three senators on the budget conference committee came before their colleagues to report the stalemate and to solicit advice on dealing with the intransigence of the House. For more than three hours, one senator after another argued to preserve the high standard of instruction Massachusetts provides to disabled students. No one, according to several senators in attendance, urged the conferees to fold or to cut a deal.

There was silence in the room when Senator Fred Berry spoke. As the Senate's longest-serving member and an integral part of Senate President Thomas Birmingham's leadership team, the 50-year-old Peabody Democrat commands that kind of attention. But on Thursday, he spoke not as the able senator he is now but as the disabled boy he was once. Stricken with cerebral palsy at birth, Berry struggled with a brain injury that left his speech and his gait impaired. When Berry was growing up, there was no law in Massachusetts guaranteeing disabled students a "maximum feasible" education, the current state standard that Finneran is determined to replace with the lower federal guarantee of "free and appropriate" education.

Berry was taunted so cruelly in first grade that the next year his mother tutored him at home. He spent his middle school years at the residential Massachusetts Hospital School in Canton, but insisted on returning to Peabody to attend Bishop Fenwick High School. He edited the school newspaper, played sports, and was voted the "most witty" graduate in the Class of 1968.

Citing the confidentiality of conference committee deliberations, Berry declined to discuss the specifics of the budget impasse, but other senators described his speech as impassioned. Berry credited his life's accomplishments - a master's degree in education, two terms on the Peabody city council, his election to the Senate - to a supportive family and an iron will that many of his peers say is the equal of Finneran's.

He has had a successful life, he said, but "if I had the maximum feasible education as a child I'd be the governor now."

For 25 years, Massachusetts has provided just such an education to disabled children. Is it expensive for local school districts? Sure, but not because the standard of education is too high; the state contribution is too low. Massachusetts now pays for less than one-quarter of special education costs. Nationally, on average, states shoulder more than half the burden. The rise in special ed costs in recent years has less to do with the purportedly unreasonable demands of parents than with the medical progress that has allowed more disabled children to survive to school age.