VHS AP Cybersecurity or Honors Spanish 3 for Junior Year: How We Worked Through The Choice
The crumpled course selection sheet sat between Lila’s half-eaten peanut butter granola bar and my coffee mug on our kitchen table last month, her soccer cleats propped against the chair leg catching crumbs. “I still can’t decide,” she said, scrolling back and forth between the VHS course catalog and her group chat with friends. “AP Cybersecurity or Honors Spanish 3. What do you think?”
Lila’s heading into junior year, so every course choice feels like it could make or break her college apps, at least that’s what all the TikTok videos and parent group threads say. She’s taken Spanish every year since freshman year, earns solid A’s, and chats every Saturday with 78-year-old Doña Rosa, a regular at the coffee shop where Lila works 12 hours a week, who only orders pan dulce in Spanish. Lila’s also been messing around building a website for her digital art portfolio, and she’s talking about majoring in information systems in college. AP Cybersecurity through VHS sounded perfect: it’s weighted GPA, it’s an AP, it lines up with her major interest, and all her friends are signing up. But taking it would mean dropping Spanish, since she can’t fit five full classes plus the online course in her schedule.
I was initially leaning toward Spanish, mostly because I still kick myself for dropping French after sophomore year and losing almost all of it, but I didn’t want to push my old regrets onto her. Instead of deciding that night, we booked a 15-minute slot with her guidance counselor, Ms. Henderson, who’s been at the district for 20 years and doesn’t sugarcoat anything for parents panicking about college.
Ms. Henderson leaned back in her chair, coffee from the school lounge staining the edge of her notebook, and laid out the facts plain. AP Cybersecurity through VHS is a legitimate, well-regarded AP, she said, and our high school doesn’t have a certified teacher to offer it in-house, so VHS is the only option. But it’s fully asynchronous, so all work is done on the student’s own time. Most kids she’s worked with report 5 to 7 hours a week of extra homework, compared to 2 to 3 hours a week for Honors Spanish 3, which is in-person at our school, meets every other day, and gets most instruction and work done during class time. She also reminded us that Lila had mentioned wanting a Spanish minor in college, and stopping after two years makes it really hard to pick back up without re-taking a whole course later.
After that meeting, I called my neighbor whose son took that same VHS AP Cybersecurity last year for junior year. She laughed and said he loved the content, but he ended up with a B+ because he fell behind during cross country season, and he could never get quick help when he got stuck on coding problems. The online teacher only checked emails once every 48 hours, so he’d sit for a whole day stuck on one problem before he could move on. That stuck with me, because Lila already has soccer three days a week, 12 hours of work, and two other APs (AP Lang and AP Bio) already on her schedule for next year.
Instead of just talking about it, we pulled out our old kitchen whiteboard and mapped out every hour of Lila’s average week. We wrote down soccer practice, work shifts, homework time for her other two APs, time she spends with friends on the weekend, and even the 45 minutes a night she spends drawing that she refuses to give up. When we added an average of 6 hours a week for AP Cybersecurity, the only places to cut were drawing time or an entire work shift every week. Lila needs the job money to save for a car, and drawing is her main way to unwind, so that was a clear red flag we wouldn’t have seen if we hadn’t written it all down.
I’ve talked to so many parents lately who default to picking the “most impressive” course for college apps, no matter what the time commitment is, but this process showed me that asking two specific questions cuts through all that noise better than any college admissions blog post. First, can you take this class another time that fits your schedule better? We found out VHS offers AP Cybersecurity every summer, so Lila can take it after junior year, before senior year, when she doesn’t have soccer or other classes, and it’ll still show up on her transcript before she sends out college apps. Second, do you use or need this skill right now, or is it just for the transcript? Lila uses Spanish every single week at work, it makes her job more fun, and she’s already building on a skill she started years ago. Cybersecurity is interesting, but it doesn’t serve any immediate need for her, it’s just something to add to the list.
For other parents working through the same kind of choice, mapping out the weekly schedule takes 20 minutes, it’s free, and it shows you immediately what your kid can actually handle, not just what they think they want. Also, always ask a parent whose kid already took the online AP how much work it really was, and how accessible the teacher is. The course catalog never tells you that part.
We ended up putting Honors Spanish 3 on Lila’s course sheet. She still texts her friend Mia who signed up for AP Cybersecurity, and asks for updates once a week, and sometimes says she wonders if she made the wrong call. We have a plan, though: if after the first two weeks of school she really hates Spanish and wants to switch, she can drop into the VHS class during the add/drop period, no harm done. Right now, she’s been reviewing old Spanish vocab on her commute to work, and she’s excited for the Hispanic Heritage Month food day Ms. Torres, the Spanish teacher, does every year. We don’t know if this choice will help her get into her dream state school or not, and there’s no way to know what would have happened if we picked the other one. But it fits her life right now, and that’s more than enough for a junior year course choice.
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