Comparing schools and their academic performances — the best grades, the most college scholarships — is risky. Though facts are facts, emotions embedded in school pride are hard to tamp down.

With that, we nevertheless give you the senior class of Anniston High School.

On Thursday, the school honored the class of 2012 at a ceremony. As Star reporter Katie Wood explained in her story, AHS seniors were recognized for earning more than 50 post-graduate scholarship awards from colleges, foundations, organizations, churches and the military; overall, those scholarships are worth more than $200,000. AHS officials believe those numbers may rise this spring as more students receive added attention for their academic achievement.

Any way you viewed it, Thursday’s ceremony was a refreshing change for a high school whose much-needed improvement is so often debated during discussions about Anniston’s future. The Anniston of tomorrow — the one that competes for job opportunities — needs its only public high school to be a magnet that draws positive attention to this city.

That fact wasn’t lost on those attending the ceremony. As Vanesha Crawford, one of the top AHS students honored Thursday, told The Star, people “say so many negative things about Anniston, but today we showed them that we have academics.”

Here is where we pause to caution readers not to lower this discussion into a “my school did better than your school” ramble. As we said earlier: facts are facts. This isn’t a football game, and it does none of us any good to dissect the breakdown of scholarships given to Calhoun County’s assorted senior classes.

Or, simply, everyone knows that the senior class at The Donoho School — a college preparatory private school in east Anniston — will earn an impressive array of scholarships that dwarfs that of most other area schools. The same can be said for public schools such as Jacksonville High and Oxford High, who are but two examples of Calhoun County public schools whose highest-achieving students are impressive.

But that’s not what this is about.

Instead, this is about our yearning for more days like Thursday — days when the much-maligned Anniston High can proudly tout its best and its brightest. It is a sign of what is possible with public education in Anniston. That sign says what we truly believe: with hard work, with proper instruction, with community support, Anniston High students can reach for the stars.

When they succeed, Anniston succeeds.