Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and city schools CEO Andrés Alonso said yesterday that Baltimore schools will never be able to meet current and future financial needs without significantly changing funding sources and looking into new legislative options.

Officials said there is a $2.8 billion funding shortfall for school construction and renovation that is the result of a local tax base that is inadequate to meeting the needs of an ailing school infrastructure.

In response to the shortfall, Rawlings-Blake and Alonso announced the formation of a task force to develop solutions for capital school construction and renovation and that will explore other financing and legislative options. The panel will present their recommendations in February 2011.

Dilapidated facilities threaten the advancements made by Baltimore City Schools under Alonso, Rawlings-Blake said.

“High quality school facilities have measurable impacts on student learning,” she said. “When kids have high quality facilities, they do better, they want to come to school, and they want to stay in school.”

Alonso reiterated that message.

These failing facilities make it “incredibly difficult to communicate to children that they are at the center of everything we do as a government and community,” said Alonso.

In addition to the problems that students face, poor school facilities make it difficult to recruit and retain teachers, he said.

Speaking at a City Hall news conference, Alonso and Rawlings-Blake said that the new task force would seek out examples of other schools systems who have successfully overcome financial difficulties. They did not give any examples, but reiterated that “all options are on the table.”

“There are only two or three examples in the entire nation of school systems that have done what we might be able to do,” Alonso said. “What we’re looking for is a really landmark way of looking at this problem.”

The limited tax base for funding school improvements in Baltimore City makes it difficult to do anything but maintain the status quo in schools. This translates to schools that haven’t been updated since the 1970s that Alonso described as having “windows that can’t open, air conditioning that doesn’t work, and boilers that shut down in the middle of winter.”

Officials said this latest push is intended to solve the problem in a comprehensive way. “If we try to do this one bite at a time it would be generations before we would have an impact, ” said Rawlings-Blake said.

“If we follow the present pattern it will take 50 years,” said Alonso. “I want it done in five.”