AS RHODE ISLAND continues to reel from both years of budget mismanagement and our economic woes, it escapes no one’s notice that the cities and towns are reeling, too. North Providence plans an unpaid payday for its employees, while Providence is banking on being able to tax college students.

The story is that not only is there the natural reluctance to raising taxes, but towns are wearing a shiny set of fiscal handcuffs these days in the form of a law limiting the increase in the amount of money they can collect in taxes each year. Applying this limit to the amount of money instead of the tax rate is an interesting idea. It means that even if the tax base increases — if there is some new construction in town, or a new business moves in — the increase in the town’s property value can’t be captured in property taxes.

This law was the brainchild of Teresa Paiva-Weed, Democrat of Newport. She is now the Senate president, so until she changes her mind about its wisdom, the towns will wear these handcuffs.

But all is not lost. Mayors and city and town councilors have been begging for the “tools” they need to reduce their budgets, and help is on the way from the state Board of Regents, in charge of elementary and secondary education.

The word “tools” has a clean and abstract sound doesn’t it? Imagine a razor-sharp auger or perhaps a scalpel deployed in service of delicate budget surgery. Well, maybe.

Among the many duties of the Regents is to oversee a set of standards for what constitutes a school in Rhode Island. They have a set of curriculum standards to dictate what you can expect a fourth-grader to learn, achievement standards to say what we expect a 10th-grader to know, and professional standards to say what we expect a teacher to be. But they also have a set called the “basic educational program” that specifies what you can expect the staff of a school to look like. For example, it says there should be a music program and a library, and says more or less what they should look like.

Until now. You’ll be glad to know that after the Regents’ meeting on June 4, many of these restrictions on local districts will be raised.

In February, the Regents put out a proposal for a new set of standards. The new standards excise pretty much every mention of staff and staff qualifications, save only for psychologists. The old standards contained sentences like “there shall be a halftime [librarian] in schools with 250 to 499 children,” and “at least 20 minutes in each school day is devoted to health and physical education taught by certified personnel.” (Recess is not considered physical education.)

The new standard contains sentences like these: “A high quality visual arts & design and performing arts education program leads to arts literacy for all students.” But nowhere does it require any school to have such a “high quality” program. In fact, in the very next paragraph it says schools will only be obligated to offer courses in “at least one” of the performing arts.

The physical-education standards will say what we expect children to know about their bodies and about fitness, but they don’t dictate times or the staff to do this teaching. The “Library and Media” section is my favorite and doesn’t mention staff at all, as if the books in the library — excuse me, the “high-quality library-media program” — will just float off the shelves and into the backpacks of willing young readers. The rest is the same, lots of “high quality” but very little in the way of specific requirements.

Another delightful surprise in reviewing this opus was in the cover sheet that called for comments. It requested comments on the “economic impact on small business and cities and towns.” It did not request comments on the educational value of the changes being proposed, or their potential to affect dropout rates in our high schools, let alone the value of learning to appreciate the most beautiful achievements of our civilization.

The upshot is that school districts will be freed from the fiscal shackles that bind them and can manage their programs to increase their productivity. Sounds good? Even better, how about we say they can empower high-quality local school leadership to manage a streamlined 21st Century cutting-edge high-quality education program. What this means, of course, is there will be nobody to insist that elementary music classes aren’t just an hour of listening to the radio once a week with the regular teacher. If some school committee wants to call that a “high quality music program,” then there’s now officially no one to say otherwise.

So wave a fond farewell to your school librarians, the music and art teachers, the drama teachers and all the extras that make kids want to go to school. After the June 4 meeting, they won’t be required, so how long do you think your town will keep them?

People complain about unfunded mandates, and they have a point that a lot of the things a city or town is forced to do come without money.

Special-education mandates, for example, can prove quite expensive, and federal dollars seldom cover more than about 20 percent of their cost.

But you can take the point too far. After all, having a school at all is essentially an unfunded mandate.

But the passage of regulations like these are essentially to say we no longer care what kinds of services are delivered by our towns, we care only how much they cost.

Is this true? Let the Regents know what you think about the Basic Educational Plan — details at whatcheer.net.

Tom Sgouros is editor of the Rhode Island Policy Reporter, a Web site.