Trying to total an Attendance Value based on a 1 or 0 flag in another table

[bfrrazee]

Student

Student Number	Student	School	School id	Caucasion	African	Indigenous
654651654	Jim Jones	ABC Elementary	150	0	0	1
845484654	Jen Jims	ABC Elementary	150	0	0	1
984654984	Kim Steves	ABC Elementary	150	0	1	0

School

School	School Number	District
ABC Elementary	150	North

Attendance

District	School	Student Number	Absences
North	ABC Elementary	654651654	6
North	ABC Elementary	845484654	5
North	ABC Elementary	984654984	3

I have 3 tables like above, related like this:

Active Schools 1  <-----> Many   Active Students on School ID

Active Students 1 < ---> 1 Attendance on Student ID

This is one to one because when the data was pulled from our Student info it was aggregated per student by late, Absent, Religious holiday etc to make pulling data easier.

So my questions is how can I take a total sum on the attendance grouped by Demographic.

The result should be 

African - 3

Indigenous - 11

Caucasian - 0

I feel like this requires more advanced Dax expressions that i am not familiar with but please any solution i would love!

[MattAllington · Accepted solution]

The DAX is always easier when you have the correct table structure. Can a student have a 1 for more than one demographic?  If not, I suggest you use Power Query to add a single new column that contains the word relating to each student.  Then with the mode l you have, the DAX will be a simple sum. 

[bfrrazee]

Yes unfortunately some students can Identify as more than one demographic where a 1 will be populated in the corresponding column.

[MattAllington]

Then what is the total to be if a student has 1 in a second column?  Regardless, I would then change the model. This is how I would do it

create a unique student table without the demographic columns

create a second table called demographics. Unpivot the demographic columns and remove the zeros. 
join the first table to the second 1:many

turn in BI directional filtering (assuming performance is not impacted). Less than 1m students should be fine. 
use the attribute column from the demographic table - it should just work, not withstanding my opening question

[bfrrazee]

The behaviour would be if a student has 2 demographics they would be counted for the total in each one independent of each other. Because of the way they identify demographics this is how it has to be, we cannot assume they identify as one more than the other. I hope this makes sense.

Basically I am looking to do a sum attendance if African from table 2 is equal to a 1 and the same for each other demographic.

Maybe this is not possible?

[MattAllington]

If you configure the solution as I have described it will work as you have suggested. The only issue is the grand total will not add up, but you can just turn that off