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.

[160, 130, 171, 108, 35, 252, 210, 140, 261, 65, 203, 280, 95, 61, 165, 281, 32, 275, 176, 269], k=11
171