Youth and adult participants will discuss a range of issues including redistricting, entrepreneurship, voting rights and health care.

One of the main topics being discussed at the state convention is improving public education. Attorney Jennifer Watson Marsh is the Legal Redress Coordinator for the NAACP. She said the conference will take a closer look at issues that are impacting dropout rates in schools across North Carolina.

“We have sro's in Schools, student resource officers that pretty much were put in place initially to assist with safety in schools, but what has ended up happening is that these individuals have basically ended up assisting students into the prison pipeline so any small incident that happens translates into charges or other reasons children are left out of school and end up in a prison system,” said Marsh.

Marsh said Charlotte-Mecklenburg is a good example of school where changes need to be made. She said the dropout rate there is around 50 percent.

Marsh said another educational issue that’s being discussed is re-segregation in some public schools.

“Wake County, many people know about our work there because of the re-segregation issues and we will be touching on that today. One of the cities or big school districts that we will be addressing is Hanover which is where Wilmington is. They have been facing re-segregation. It is a pretty small area as far as land mass and they are moving towards neighborhood schools, which doesn’t need to be done and they are ending up with very high minority and high poverty schools when it is just not that more difficult to make these more diverse schools and interacting with each other,” said Marsh.

The NAACP said it is heavily involved in lobbying the state General Assembly to restore more than a billion dollars in cuts from public education.

It’s the 68th year for the convention, which wraps up Saturday evening with a banquet.