Toby Merrill’s 6-year-old son has a rare progressive disease and can’t walk independently or talk — but he loves to play outdoors. The boy attends Newton’s Reflections program, the city’s substantially separate classroom for children with profound special needs, housed at Williams Elementary School. At school, however, the boy can’t join other children on the play structure at recess because it isn’t fully handicapped accessible.

“The next few years are his healthiest, the ones in which he will be most able to play on a playground at all,’’ Merrill wrote in a November 2024 letter to Newton school district officials, which she shared with me. “How could Newton have chosen to send some of its most significantly disabled young children to a school where they cannot play outside with their peers, and plan to do nothing unless parents (of largely non-verbal kids who don’t live nearby) noticed and complained?’’

Merrill has spent two years advocating, with other parents, for the Newton school district to build an accessible playground at Williams or move the Reflections program to a building with a more accessible playground — like the Lincoln-Eliot Elementary School. It’s a request that’s eminently justified: The citywide program for Newton’s most disabled children should be in a place where those kids can play outside with their peers. For elementary school students, recess is a vital part of their day, when children exercise, develop physical skills, and learn to interact socially. Those needs are as important, if not more so, for children with physical or developmental disabilities who may need to work harder than children without disabilities to control their bodies or interact appropriately with peers. But, as the parents have learned, the will to make change is easily stymied by a bureaucratic logjam.

As Merrill put it, “No one’s taken ownership of fixing this problem.’’

Parents who spoke with me and who submitted public testimony to the School Committee in February 2025 agreed that Reflections — which today serves 11 elementary school-age students — is a high-quality program. As special needs students elsewhere in Massachusetts struggle to access basic accommodations, Newton families are lucky to have Reflections. But the lack of a universally accessible playground is an oversight that, if corrected, could turn Reflections from a good program into a statewide model.

Reflections was created in the 2021-2022 school year. Former Newton School Committee member Rajeev Parlikar told me recently that at that time, there was an assumption among families with special needs children that the playground would be upgraded.

Ashley Raven, a preschool teacher at Newton Early Childhood Program, where many students with disabilities attend preschool, told the School Committee in written testimony submitted in February 2025 that preschool staff worried about the lack of an accessible playground at Williams, and “we were assured repeatedly that it would be addressed.’’

The school district put mats over wood chips so students in wheelchairs can approach the play structure and built a swing set with two accessible swings. But the playground has one central play structure with no ramps or access for students with limited mobility, like most Reflections students.

Jessica Harkiewicz, the parent of a first-grader in Reflections, called it “mind-boggling’’ that the most medically complex children in the city lack an accessible playground. “For these kids, it’s important for social time and for physical development,’’ Harkiewicz said. She questioned the message it sends to non-disabled children when their peers with disabilities are excluded from playing with them.

In separate interviews, Newton School Superintendent Anna Nolin and City of Newton Chief Operating Officer Josh Morse both said the Williams playground needs updating to make it universally accessible and said the estimated cost would be around $1.2 million. What wasn’t clear was the path forward to make that happen.

Morse said the city has improved accessibility at several school playgrounds over the past few years, but Newton has a lot of infrastructure needs, and it’s up to the School Committee to set priorities for which school gets upgraded first. “Williams is on that list [for upgrades]. I don’t know where the School Committee ranked it,’’ Morse said.

But Nolin said the problem is getting city funding. She too cited competing priorities and a tight budget. “I can’t generate revenue,’’ Nolin said. “If I say Williams is a top priority … it may or may not be funded, according to the money available at a city level.’’ Nolin said the only school playground that’s universally accessible to modern standards for elementary school-age children is at the Lincoln-Eliot Elementary School. Nolin said that school was outfitted to house other programs, and it would be costly to move Reflections there.

David Mahlowitz, an attorney who’s married to Harkiewicz, said that while the city and school are debating responsibility, his son is denied the opportunity to play on a playground with his peers. Mahlowitz said his son learned how to walk in part from playing on the Newton Early Childhood Program playground, but now there’s little he can do at Williams. Mahlowitz is considering suing the city for violating federal civil rights laws.

Newton’s most severely disabled kids deserve a playground. It shouldn’t take a lawsuit for the city to act.

Shira Schoenberg can be reached at shira.schoenberg@globe.com. Follow her @shiraschoenberg.