A Texas teacher’s “fart corner” has pulled in nearly 50 million TikTok views after turning a daily classroom habit into a routine her students use without fuss.

Valecia Broussard, 38, from Pearland, Texas, created the corner at the beginning of this school year after noticing her fourth-grade students had become very comfortable passing gas in class.

Broussard, who is in her 15th year of teaching and teaches fourth-grade Reading and Language Arts, said she was thinking through routines and expectations for the year when she decided to address a behaviour that had become common.

“Over the past three years, I noticed that my students were shockingly and extremely comfortable with passing gas in front of one another. When I say in front of one another, that also means, on one another,” Broussard explains.

“They would fart in their desks while doing assignments, while sharpening pencils, when doing collaborative work, while walking around the classroom looking for a laptop, etc.”

Instead of treating it as shameful, Broussard set up a designated place for students to go, complete with air fresheners, to “keep the funk in one area.” She said students are also “more than welcome” to use the restroom.

Broussard told PEOPLE there was a bigger point behind the idea.

“The bigger idea is that while we are all different, read on different levels, have different home lives, and different personalities, we are all human,” she said.

She said she came to see the behaviour as something children were normalising, rather than something to punish.

“I slowly began to respect the fact that 9- and 10-year-olds were bold enough to normalize tooting and refused to allow their stomachs to hurt, which in the long run can cause digestive issues,” she says.

Broussard said students have “responded very positively” and now use the corner as part of the classroom routine.

“Because it is normalized within this generation, it is not embarrassing from what I have seen,” Broussard reveals. “They simply go to the corner, handle their business, spray their choice of air freshener and go back to what they were previously doing.”

Students have also helped decorate the space. Broussard said flowers coloured by the children now surround the “fart corner” sign.

She said parents who visited the classroom, along with fellow teachers and administrators, viewed the idea as a “hilarious, yet brilliant idea.”

After she posted a video of the corner online, Broussard’s TikTok quickly reached millions of viewers. She said many people found it funny and relatable, and some told her they wished they had a similar option in their “corporate offices, homes and classrooms.”

“The response has been overall very optimistic, and most people find it amusing, which I am absolutely grateful for,” she says. “My intentions were to genuinely create a solution for a minor classroom issue.”

Broussard said her advice to other teachers is not to copy the idea exactly, but to find what works for their own classrooms.

“Regardless of what that may be, students and teachers deserve to be comfortable and content throughout the school day,” Broussard tells PEOPLE.

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