Middle school cliques present social challenges.

Byline: Jean Nash Johnson

"In many ways, school was a cruel place, with cliques and pecking orders established among the children."

_Jimmy Carter, from his 2001 memoir, ``An Hour Before Daylight''

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The friendship circles that middle school students create can have lifelong effects. Despite his full career, former President Carter found the cliques from his school years in the `30s important enough to write about.

Today, these groups have even more potential to harm kids and schools.

Recent school shootings involving bullies and loners show how far kids can go. They respond to being shut out in provocative and destructive ways, says Charlene Giannetti, author of ``Cliques: 8 Steps to Help Your Child Survive the Social Jungle'' (Broadway Books, $14).

Giannetti has written six books on parenting and hosts a weekly live chat on cliques at the Web site

http://ivillage.com/

"The kids known as the fringe group act out to get the attention needed to get into the popular clique," she says. "For girls, it means dressing a certain way to get the attention. For others, it means drinking, drugs and early experimentation with sex."

Loners, on the other hand, want to belong but somehow don't manage it. They may fight back in extreme ways, even resorting to violence. The loners and the fringe groups make up 20 percent of the school population, Giannetti says. To further ripple the waters, bullies have gone from being loners to being part of the…