I have been pursuing when high school students will be getting the free software that Microsoft promised with the DreamSpark announcement back in February. I finally have been communicating with the team that is in charge of this and I've been told not to announce the release date but only to tell you that it will be soon. Real soon!
The distribution will be different from what college students have been doing. The high school computer science teacher must register. The high school administrators/faculty will need to accept a EULA that they will provide codes only to their students and that the software will be used for academic or research purposes. Microsoft will then verify the institution is a valid high school and provide them with the number of access codes the administrators need. The codes provided can be used once and only once so if students access the site and then try to distribute code around the web it will not work.
This is worth waiting for and your students will benefit from working with the products they will be getting for FREE!
I'll be teaching XNA to my programming students again this year and I'm interested in the XNA creators club membership for them.
Thanks to Andy Dunn and Clint Ruckas for helping me find the contact person at Microsoft to get this information.