In this task, you are given a list of integers and an integer k. You need to find the kth smallest element in the input list and return that.

[209, 36, 151, 99, 21, 91, 38, 230, 289, 204, 33, 254, 278, 115, 137, 24, 76, 174, 118, 126], k=9
115