Q: 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.
[144, 283, 257, 94, 54, 261, 75, 182, 199, 111, 106, 103, 251, 252, 222, 109, 203, 280, 45, 81], k=2
A:
54