Gary Hines, music director for the Grammy award-winning group Sounds of Blackness, played “Tears in Heaven” as the family sang. Barway’s sister Lulu, 2, babbled through the harmonies, saying “Hi” to her brother’s statue before hugging and kissing it.

For Hines, celebrating Collins’ life represents Sounds of Blackness’ mission to connect communities through music.

“I would hope that the unity in the community that we see right here, at this beautiful memorial event and service, would be sustained — would proliferate from community to the cities, state and nation,” he said.

Barway’s death has haunted Keith Demmings for years. The 61-year-old bus driver often thinks about what could have been done to prevent his death, and about what his son could learn from Barway’s life. Demmings said he hopes more adults will watch out for and care about youth in the community.

Barway “could have been a basketball player. He could have been a senator or something. He could have been the president of the United States, but we were robbed of that,” Demmings said. “I feel that our youth are being cheated. We can’t just brush it off, we need to be more involved … [in] raising our kids.”

As Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump begin the final 30-day push for the White House, they are locked in a neck-and-neck race from the Rust Belt to the Sun Belt.

With polling averages showing all seven battleground states nearly tied, many Democrats believe their biggest advantage may be an extensive ground game operation that their party has spent more than a year building across the country. Trump’s campaign thinks that recent events — the escalating conflict in the Middle East and deadly hurricanes that have killed more than 200 people across the Southeast — will give it an edge in the final weeks.

In some ways, the two approaches mirror the final days of the 2016 race, when Hillary Clinton’s campaign boasted about a massive, data-driven field organization, while Trump pressed a national message based on stoking anti-immigrant sentiment and improving the economy with a relatively meager staff and almost no field operation in the key states. Trump, of course, prevailed, helped by the FBI director’s reopening of an inquiry into the Democratic nominee’s emails.

This time, Democrats have no such overconfidence. Although Trump and his party have lost or underperformed in every major election since then, many Democrats believe this year is one they could lose.

“Anybody would be a fool to write Trump off,” said Julián Castro, the former San Antonio mayor who ran for president in 2020. “I think she’s going to win, but am I absolutely sure she’s going to win? No. The 2016 experience taught all of us that you can’t count this guy out.”

Veterans of presidential campaigns say this year’s contest is distinct for how little impact major political events seem to be having on the relative standing of the two candidates. Two assassination attempts on Trump, a presidential and vice presidential debate and the party conventions have brought both him and Harris temporary bumps in support but no enduring shifts in public opinion.

The result is what top officials in both campaigns describe as a grind-it-out race, where movements measured in a few thousand votes could sway the outcome of the entire election.

Ralph Reed, a socially conservative activist in Georgia who is helping turn out voters for the Trump campaign, said he could not recall a presidential race since 2000 in which so many states were effectively tied this late in the campaign.

Sullivan argued that Clapp’s central dispute with the school district was about the policies in the contract, not any incidental money that might be spent to put them into practice. He said that the law was designed for taxpayers to protect themselves from the injury of an increased tax burden resulting from illegal government expenses. There would be “virtually no limit” to taxpayers’ ability to file legal challenges to government policies if they can sue over the incidental funds used to implement policies, he said.

Justice Paul Thissen asked if the school district had spent money to implement the new contract provisions. Sullivan said no. Minneapolis Public Schools has not laid off a teacher in 14 years, he said. Justice Karl Procaccini asked who would have standing to challenge the legality of the new contract provisions if taxpayers did not.

“If the language were to be utilized in a manner that a teacher believed that they were being discriminated against on the basis of a protected characteristic, that teacher would have standing to challenge the application of the language,” Sullivan said.

Michael Bekesha, an attorney with the Washington, D.C.-based conservative foundation Judicial Watch, argued on Clapp’s behalf.The justices repeatedly asked him what made this case different from the taxpayer standing issue in Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Hunt.

Bekesha argued that the contract provision was illegal, and therefore any funds used to implement it were being illegally spent. “The Minnesota equal protection guarantee prohibits governments from making decisions, from taking actions, exclusively, only, based on race,” Bekesha argued.

Hudson suggested that Clapp’s disagreements with the school district focused on policy, not funds.