I am with the do what you love camp. My D loves drama and choir. When she was starting HS, a parent of a former valedictorian laid out a plan for us to have her take as many weighted AP classes as possible, take health as a correspondence class, and speech at the local CC. This basically would have prevented her from taking 4 years of choir and theater to focus on the weighted AP & pre-AP classes and then spend extra time outside of school to get some core classes taken care of. If this is what it takes to be in the competition for valedictorian then it just didn’t feel worth it to us. My daughter took the classes she wanted and had a great time. She’s also made great friends in theater and choir. She could have had a higher GPA, but it would not have been a good trade-off. Let your child participate in what they love and make sure they know that they need to keep up their grades.