FAIR HAVEN, Vt. – A Vermont school district has agreed to pay one of its critics $147,500 after a judge ruled the district violated his rights to free speech and due process.

Marcel and Veronica Cyr repeatedly criticized Benson Village School in 2011 over how their autistic son was treated. The couple also put up signs in their yard and decorated their car with slogans calling for residents to defeat the school’s budget when their concerns were ignored.

Officials with the school district, the Addison Rutland Supervisory Union, eventually issued a no-trespass order against Marcel Cyr, preventing him from stepping foot on any school property in the six-town school district for two years, VT Digger reports.

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District officials claimed to have a tip that Cyr was a dangerous person, and used an opinion of a mental health professional who never met with the parent as a basis for the order. School officials also said “some staff members were afraid of Cyr, who claimed to have hearing loss from operating heavy equipment and spoke loudly,” according to ABAJournal.com.

The no-trespass order did not provide exceptions for school board meetings.

Cyr then submitted a public records request for information pertaining to his no-trespass order, but school officials sued him in an effort to withhold the documents. Cyr won that lawsuit and was provided the records, which served as the basis for a federal lawsuit he later filed against the district with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union.

From VT Digger:

U.S. District Court Judge J. Garvan Murtha issued a summary judgment Sept. 30, ruling that the no-trespass orders amounted to “a categorical ban on expressive speech” that singled out Cyr for censorship.

The court also held that the orders violated Cyr’s right to due process because they contained no explanation of why they were issued, no way to contest them and were issued in such a nonstandard way as to create a likelihood of misuse.

At the same time, the court denied Cyr’s claim that the First Amendment afforded him the right to attend the school board meetings, concluding “there is no First Amendment right of access to a school board meeting.”

“This is a great ruling for free speech and open government in Vermont,” said Allen Gilbert, Vermont ACLU executive director, according to the Burlington Free Press. “What the ruling says is that schools and towns cannot skirt the Constitution by deciding that they don’t want to hear someone’s critical voice.”

District attorney Pietro Lynn told the Free Press that the ruling “places a very heavy burden on school districts and school administrators when confronted with potentially dangerous members of the community.”

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ABA Journal reports that the district opted to settle with Cyr for $147,500.

The Cyrs, who had two children attending Benson Village School at the time, have since moved out of town, according to media reports.

Dan Barrett, the ACLU attorney who represented Cyr, told VT Digger that voters like Cyr represent the “heart of democracy” and that “government agencies across Vermont should read this ruling.”