A new plan for school vouchers that passed the Ohio House and Senate last week is expected to be signed by Gov. DeWine before year’s end.

Under the proposal, the Valley’s two largest school districts will continue to lose students to parochial and private schools — as they have in the past.

That’s because school buildings within the Warren and Youngstown districts will continue to be identified as EdChoice-eligible programs.

Statewide, however, the number of buildings in which students are eligible to move from their public schools to private ones will drop to 473. That’s a big change from the more than 1,200 schools that would have been eligible in the EdChoice plan that was stopped earlier this year.

In addition, the new plan is designed to have no more than 600 EdChoice eligible schools in any given year going forward, according to state Sen. Matt Huffman, R-Lima, the author of the legislation.

The prior EdChoice program was expected to grow to more than 1,200 schools because it was too reliant on state school report card grades, according to its critics.

Read more in Sunday’s Vindicator.