As the new year begins, is there a guideline to setting up your classes for Scratch 2.01? Do I ask parents to sign up with their kids, or is there a way to do it from school? Thanks

At the moment, there is no way to do that. All accounts are the same kind.

The Scratch Team does plan on setting up something like this in the future, though. However, that is several months or possibly well over a year down the road.

It's probably be best to have them create an accounts in class. It is a simple process and quick.

I'd suggest there's also the option of using the online editor as if it's a standalone app.

You see, you don't need an account to create a project - just click the “Create” link in the top bar, even when not signed in.
And you can save and load projects to/from disk just as if it's a normal standalone app (via the File menu -> Download/Upload).

Even though there are a lot of people who are after “the 2.0 download version of Scratch that's meant to be out by now”, it's not clear to me that it makes a huge amount of practical difference in many cases, since the way you'd end up using such an app would probably be (for the most part) very similar to how you can use the online editor with upload/download as is.

The only difference I can think of off-hand is that you need a ‘net connection to get started (clicking that “Create” link). There are clearly some situations where some might want to work without a connection (though you even don’t need it again once you have the page loaded -as long as you don't click off the page!), but I suspect that's not a particular problem within many schools…?

But then maybe there are other considerations I've not thought of?